Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Grayson Perry is contemplating robbery. And no, the esteemed artist and broadcaster has not gone to rack and ruin. We\u2019re at the Wallace Collection in London, where an exhibition of his newest works is mid-install. A dependably sharp-witted response to the old mansion\u2019s holdings, Delusions of Grandeur is three years and \u201cat least 20\u201d visits in the making, so it\u2019s fair to say he is on intimate terms with its every silk-papered nook. This is how he came to be deliberating his fantasy heist of an item from the collection.\u201cI think about this a lot,\u201d Perry says. \u201cI can be really tasteful and say the Vel\u00e1zquez or the big Gainsborough; the stuff with gold-standard academic credentials \u2014 \u2018good choice, Grayson!\u2019 \u2014 but I dunno, some of the guns are amazing. When you think they are handmade, from an era before machine tools; as a person who makes things, I find that so beautiful.\u201dWe have met in the museum\u2019s glass-roofed courtyard, a tranquil space of potted trees and swag curtains that, in the days when the omnivorous collector Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890) called the building home, was a sculpture garden. It is early March, the weather turning, the sky two storeys above our heads crystalline blue.Perry, who became a household name on winning the Turner Prize in 2003, will be 65 next week. He is celebrating the milestone rou\u00e9-style, he tells me, with a grand glittery party at which he will perform songs about his life and wear the dress he has designed with Liberty as one of the objects in the new exhibition. It\u2019s a silk, piecrust-collared pinafore \u2014 part Victorian child, part 1970s Laura Ashley garden party.Perry has been cross-dressing since the age of 13, but he has come as himself today rather than his alter ego Claire, in baggy cords, a fleece and a T-shirt that has seen better days. His nails are rimed with glaze or paint and his gossamer curls sleep-mussed. He has the wan cast of someone who has done recent battle with a deadline.\u00a0Half a century into his career, does he still get nervous before an opening? \u201cYeah unconsciously, I think I do. I put on a good front, but I always feel slightly like I\u2019m standing on a flagpole and everybody is looking up, waiting for me to fall off.\u201d He laughs. \u201cVery British.\u201dInviting Perry, an artist known for tackling the absurdities of class and taste into a museum whose collection cants heavily towards gilt-garlanded knick-knackery and fandangles, might seem a bold choice. But he has always been interested in clich\u00e9s and strange cultural connections, and arguably his pots and tapestries, his shrines, maps and Bafta-winning TV programmes thrive on just this sort of dissonance. Still, he stumbled: \u201cI liked it. I enjoyed my visits. But I didn\u2019t love it, and I knew I needed to love it to make work from it.\u201d\u00a0His solution was to create \u201csomeone to love the collection for me\u201d. Enter Shirley Smith, a Barking-born, self-taught outsider artist who believes herself the Wallaces\u2019 lost heir. \u201cHer\u201d works, which are inspired by her favourite pieces in the collection, will be shown beside Perry\u2019s. \u201cI like those shifting layers of reality, where you\u2019re not sure she\u2019s not real.\u201d\u00a0As with his previous fictional personas \u2014 Julie Cope for the 2012-15 multiwork \u201cA House of Essex\u201d; Tim Rakewell in the tapestry \u201cThe Vanity of Small Differences\u201d (2012) \u2014 Perry has given Shirley a rich back-story. She is \u201ca kind of amalgam\u201d of real outsider artists Madge Gill (British, 1882-1961) and Aloi\u0308se Corbaz (Swiss, 1886-1964), but also a favourite aunt and his mother, Jean; \u201cintelligent working-class women who were thwarted by their circumstances\u201d.While looking for objects in the Wallace that he or Shirley could respond to, Perry tells me, he happened on a truth. \u201cOne of the things we all do when we come to a museum, unconsciously or otherwise, is to look for ourselves,\u201d he explains. \u201cThings that shout out to us. It\u2019s the same with people. When people say they fall in love at first sight, what they really mean is transference at first sight \u2014 it reminds you of something deep within you; some other relationship.\u201dThe tapestry \u201cStory of My Life\u201d, for instance, collages swooning women from the sentimental genre paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Louis-L\u00e9opold Boilly, whose works Richard Wallace collected with abandon and to which Perry found himself irresistibly drawn. \u201cAm I somehow admitting to being a bit of a drama queen?\u201d he writes in the catalogue. \u201cOr is it a reflection of the turbulence of my (and Shirley\u2019s) early life?\u201dSentimental, shiny and showy, it\u2019s true this corner of art can be hard to love. Perhaps Perry\u2019s chief beef, though, is its polite, \u201cstructured fun\u201d quality, \u201cbecause politeness is the enemy of authentic communication, and I suppose I try always to operate in a visual language that communicates what I think of as authentic.\u201d He explains this by comparing it to the way \u201cwe all immediately know when what we are hearing isn\u2019t spontaneous thought, don\u2019t we? Reading is too regular, it has no hesitations or filler words or gaps.\u201d\u00a0He has long been interested in authenticity\u2019s flip side, too \u2014 fakes. \u201cI love patina, rust and the look of old objects,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause they suggest the authority of history and I enjoy faking that. He does it \u201creally well\u201d, he adds \u2014 and it\u2019s true. For his 2011 exhibition The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum, he placed a helmet he had made while studying fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1981 and left in the garden for 20 years, next to a genuine one from the Asante empire (modern-day Ghana). \u201cThe guess was which one was real, and people always chose the corroded one. Next to it, the real one looked like it had been knocked up for the local panto production of Star Wars. Hah! I loved that.\u201dHe thinks that \u201cplaying with Shirley\u201d, as he describes it, has a lot to do with that. \u201cI\u2019m not expecting anybody to be fooled, but I quite want them to have the opportunity to be fooled if they want to be. To look at a thing and think: is that really a piece of outsider art?\u201dI wonder if the appeal of outsider art \u2014\u00a0an inspiration on Perry\u2019s practice since the very beginning \u2014 has to do with his yen for authenticity. \u201cI suppose there\u2019s a romance to it, and a purity, in that it\u2019s uncluttered by the isms and agendas of the art world. Historically, outsider artists would\u2019ve been isolated from all that, but we live in an age now where nothing germinates naturally any more; there\u2019s no culture still uninfluenced by the \u2018great blender\u2019. That for me is one of the bugbears of the modern age, that authenticity doesn\u2019t have a chance. Everything becomes a \u2018thing\u2019 really quickly, and that\u2019s the end of that.\u201dWhat\u2019s the answer, I ask. \u201cDeep cynicism,\u201d he says, with what can only be described as a cackle. \u201cI\u2019ve got an impenetrable carapace of cynicism.\u201dMarch 28-October 26, wallacecollection.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Grayson Perry is contemplating robbery. And no, the esteemed artist and broadcaster has not gone to rack and ruin. We\u2019re at the Wallace Collection in London, where an exhibition of his newest works is mid-install. A dependably sharp-witted response to the old mansion\u2019s holdings,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":243798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-243797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243799,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243797\/revisions\/243799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}