Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art in its Struggle to Be Understood - Couverture souple

A visual and intellectual delight (Time Out)

Punchy, mischievous ... Hugely entertaining. You could, genuinely, take an aphorism or a quote from every second page ... This is splendid, transgressive stuff and a delight for the many Radio 4 listeners who responded enthusiastically [to Perry's Reith Lectures] ... In writing, he seeks to protect the personal in a deeply caustic art world, but in doing so also writes a love letter to art ... a thing of pleasure: petite, luxuriously printed, a mischievous little hymn to 21st-century inclusivity (Melanie Reid The Times)

This book is full of good jokes, full of cartoons, full of memorable epigrams, but above all full of thought-provoking ideas that make you want to pause on every page and say: "Discuss." I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art. It should be issued as a set text in every school (Lynn Barber Sunday Times)

The book has [a] conversational tone and lively intelligence. Beautifully illustrated, it reveals Perry to be not just an artist but a wordsmith, too... This is writing with the eye of someone who says: 'My job is to notice things that other people don't notice.' It is full of insight, and of telling points... It is acute and funny at the same time. This, I think, is why people love Perry so much. He is really smart. He says the things we wish we had thought of, and asks the questions that we want to ask. What is art? How can we tell if what we are looking at is any good? Is it OK to like certain artists? (Daily Telegraph)

A joy to read (New Statesman)

A polemic for inclusivity... The great thing about Perry's statement of it here is that you are always convinced that he believes it and lives by it (Observer)

With great good humour he debunks distinctions between highbrow and low (Sunday Times, Books of the Year)

An unpretentious aesthetic treatise (Observer, Books of the Year)

Perry's fun and wonderful book is a necessary addition to a world that must continue to ask difficult questions of art (Publishers Weekly)

Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry gives the 2013 Reith Lectures, presented by Sue Lawley.

Marcel Duchamp famously declared that a urinal was a work of art. It sometimes seems that anything qualifies, from a pile of sweets on a gallery floor to an Oscar-winning actress asleep in a box. So how does the ordinary art lover decide?

In four lectures recorded in front of audiences in London, Liverpool and Londonderry, self-proclaimed “transvestite potter” Grayson Perry discusses what makes him an artist, and asks what are the limits of contemporary art. He reflects on the idea of ‘quality’, and examines who and what defines what we see and value as art.

The mainstream media seems drawn to the idea of an avant-garde: work is described as "cutting edge”, artists are “radical", ideas are “ground-breaking", "game-changing" or “revolutionary”. Yet, Perry argues, art has lost its ability to shock; we have seen it all before.

Whilst recalling his own journey, from playing with paint as a child to being an award-winning successful artist, he reflects on being an outsider. He asks why men and women have made art throughout history, and discusses its central purpose: to heal psychic wounds and make meaning.