Midway through his documentary television series All in the Best Possible Taste, the artist Grayson Perry visits a show home in a new residential estate in southeast England. The house is a full-scale version of the other homes available for purchase in the estate, furnished and decorated to give prospective buyers a sense of the living environment that could be theirs. The woman guiding Perry around explains that the house encapsulated a lifestyle that she felt could suit her own—so much so that she decided to buy the show home itself, and all of its contents (even the crackers in the cupboards). “It was like moving into a hotel,” she tells Perry. “All I brought was my handbag. It was all done.”
The scene exemplifies the notion of an aspirational purchase—buying into a decidedly middle-class neighborhood—but receives special focus in the show for what it says about taste. The choice to buy the fully decorated house over its identical but undecorated neighbor precludes the need for future taste decisions. Rather than coming to reflect the owner’s taste, the show home becomes the owner’s taste: a middle-class palate bought ready-made.
Perry’s artistic interests coalesce around how taste is informed by class, and his TV show is a kind of anthropological safari through the landscapes of Britain’s three taste “tribes”: working class, middle class, and upper class. As research, he trains his binoculars on rituals: primping for a night out at the social club in postindustrial Sunderland, sipping rosé while perusing Jamie Oliver kitchenwares, selecting the appropriate pink trousers for an after-polo reception. He is particularly interested in default choices, those positions and judgments made unconsciously—from hosting dinner parties and purchasing cars to simply having curtains. He doesn’t come down heavily on either side of the tastes he explores, but does critique close-mindedness and occasionally ridicules stuffy behavior. Perry’s aim is to push society to reflect on the motivations or pressures that produce their decisions. As he explains in the interview that follows, “I’m trying to do therapy on the whole society, by saying, ‘Here’s what you’re like. If you like it, great. If you don’t, you can change it. But if you don’t know that’s what’s going on, you’re stuck with it. You’re a victim of it.’” (...)
Guernica: Where does taste begin?
Grayson Perry: Well, taste is a phenomenon. Most of taste is unconscious—it comes from your upbringing, from your family, from your society, your gender, your race; it’s a melange of all those things. The basic premise of taste, as Stephen Bayley, the cultural critic, said, is that taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Most people want to fit in with their tribe in some way or another, so they give off signals, whether it’s with their clothes, their behavior, their car, their whatever, and gain status. Every tribe has a hierarchy, and that’s what taste is: it’s an unconscious display of who you are, and where you want to be. (...)
Guernica: Looking at the three class taste tribes you trace in the TV program (working, middle, upper), it struck me that working-class taste and upper-class taste share certain qualities—namely, a sense of nostalgia and holding on to a past identity—while middle-class taste seems to not.
Grayson Perry: There’s a desperation in middle-class people to try to be individual. I think it’s an illusion on the whole, because curiously they all end up being an individual in the same way. Because not many people are creative, really. They’re kind of individualistic but within a very narrow bandwidth of what is acceptable at the time in fashion, or what they’ve seen in magazines. Genuine maverick taste is quite rare. Say someone chooses their tattoo, right, they have a tattoo. They’re a groovy person and they have a tattoo. The real decision they made was to have the tattoo. It’s not what the tattoo is. All tattoos are basically the same. But it’s having the tattoo. They all mean the same thing, the tattoo. What is on the design is bollocks. It’s squiggly blue lines that you have on your arm.
It’s always the default position I’m interested in, the things that people do without considering it. The fact that they’ve chosen to have curtains. Middle-class people, in Britain, anyway, tend to be the intelligentsia; they’re well educated, they’re very aspirational, they’re very anxious because they’re looking down thinking, “Am I going to go that way?” or they’re looking up saying, “Oh, I’d quite like a bit of that action.” They’re the most self-conscious about it, and best informed.
Guernica: How conscious are domestic choices?
Grayson Perry: Your bobos [bourgeois-bohemians], they all agonize over their kitchen work surfaces, which is one of the epicenters of taste in the middle-class home. One woman told me, very proudly, that her kitchen work surfaces were recycled chemistry benches. And I thought, “Wow. That’s a cliché and a half to deal with.” She could name the paint shades in all her rooms as well. And the most middle-class moment was when we went up into her bedroom and I looked at the curtains, and they were sort of off-white sheet material, and she said, “Oh, they’re not curtains. They were dust cloths I had made into curtains.” And I said, “Wow, that’s the most middle-class thing I’ve ever heard. Not only are you using dust cloths as curtains, you told me you’re using dust cloths as curtains.”
Guernica: You note how a lot of effort goes into making aesthetic choices appear individual and distinct, when they are actually studiously self-conscious.
Grayson Perry: Self-consciousness, I’m very interested in that. To be creative, you need to be unselfconscious. It’s like the sound barrier when you’re an art student. You have to reach the terminal velocity where you go through the sound barrier of self-consciousness, and then pop out the other side where you’re confident enough to handle it. A lot of people never make it through and that’s a real block to being creative. You’ve got to not give a shit.
Guernica: Moments in your show convey self-righteousness in taste. How do people use taste to demonstrate their morality?
Grayson Perry: Well, the British middle class particularly want to appear good people. In the past they would have gone to church, or they would have done good works for charity, or whatever. Now, you do organic, and you recycle. Mainly it’s lip service to green issues. Because the greenest thing you can do is nothing. The greenest things you can do are: a) not have children, and b) don’t go anywhere and don’t buy anything. Of course that will be an anathema to the middle classes. So it’s a sort of superficial morality on the whole, having an allotment full of vegetables that you probably never get round to eating because there’ll be too many all at once.
Guernica: You make a distinction between displaying cultural capital and being showy with your money, but isn’t it all about consumption, fundamentally?
Grayson Perry: It’s all about status. Cultural capital is something you accrue, and it’s a subtle thing. Middle-class people in particular are more aware of it. They want the culture they consume to sort of rub off on them somehow. A big part of culture is to be seen to be consuming it.
The scene exemplifies the notion of an aspirational purchase—buying into a decidedly middle-class neighborhood—but receives special focus in the show for what it says about taste. The choice to buy the fully decorated house over its identical but undecorated neighbor precludes the need for future taste decisions. Rather than coming to reflect the owner’s taste, the show home becomes the owner’s taste: a middle-class palate bought ready-made.Perry’s artistic interests coalesce around how taste is informed by class, and his TV show is a kind of anthropological safari through the landscapes of Britain’s three taste “tribes”: working class, middle class, and upper class. As research, he trains his binoculars on rituals: primping for a night out at the social club in postindustrial Sunderland, sipping rosé while perusing Jamie Oliver kitchenwares, selecting the appropriate pink trousers for an after-polo reception. He is particularly interested in default choices, those positions and judgments made unconsciously—from hosting dinner parties and purchasing cars to simply having curtains. He doesn’t come down heavily on either side of the tastes he explores, but does critique close-mindedness and occasionally ridicules stuffy behavior. Perry’s aim is to push society to reflect on the motivations or pressures that produce their decisions. As he explains in the interview that follows, “I’m trying to do therapy on the whole society, by saying, ‘Here’s what you’re like. If you like it, great. If you don’t, you can change it. But if you don’t know that’s what’s going on, you’re stuck with it. You’re a victim of it.’” (...)
Guernica: Where does taste begin?
Grayson Perry: Well, taste is a phenomenon. Most of taste is unconscious—it comes from your upbringing, from your family, from your society, your gender, your race; it’s a melange of all those things. The basic premise of taste, as Stephen Bayley, the cultural critic, said, is that taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Most people want to fit in with their tribe in some way or another, so they give off signals, whether it’s with their clothes, their behavior, their car, their whatever, and gain status. Every tribe has a hierarchy, and that’s what taste is: it’s an unconscious display of who you are, and where you want to be. (...)
Guernica: Looking at the three class taste tribes you trace in the TV program (working, middle, upper), it struck me that working-class taste and upper-class taste share certain qualities—namely, a sense of nostalgia and holding on to a past identity—while middle-class taste seems to not.
Grayson Perry: There’s a desperation in middle-class people to try to be individual. I think it’s an illusion on the whole, because curiously they all end up being an individual in the same way. Because not many people are creative, really. They’re kind of individualistic but within a very narrow bandwidth of what is acceptable at the time in fashion, or what they’ve seen in magazines. Genuine maverick taste is quite rare. Say someone chooses their tattoo, right, they have a tattoo. They’re a groovy person and they have a tattoo. The real decision they made was to have the tattoo. It’s not what the tattoo is. All tattoos are basically the same. But it’s having the tattoo. They all mean the same thing, the tattoo. What is on the design is bollocks. It’s squiggly blue lines that you have on your arm.
It’s always the default position I’m interested in, the things that people do without considering it. The fact that they’ve chosen to have curtains. Middle-class people, in Britain, anyway, tend to be the intelligentsia; they’re well educated, they’re very aspirational, they’re very anxious because they’re looking down thinking, “Am I going to go that way?” or they’re looking up saying, “Oh, I’d quite like a bit of that action.” They’re the most self-conscious about it, and best informed.
Guernica: How conscious are domestic choices?
Grayson Perry: Your bobos [bourgeois-bohemians], they all agonize over their kitchen work surfaces, which is one of the epicenters of taste in the middle-class home. One woman told me, very proudly, that her kitchen work surfaces were recycled chemistry benches. And I thought, “Wow. That’s a cliché and a half to deal with.” She could name the paint shades in all her rooms as well. And the most middle-class moment was when we went up into her bedroom and I looked at the curtains, and they were sort of off-white sheet material, and she said, “Oh, they’re not curtains. They were dust cloths I had made into curtains.” And I said, “Wow, that’s the most middle-class thing I’ve ever heard. Not only are you using dust cloths as curtains, you told me you’re using dust cloths as curtains.”
Guernica: You note how a lot of effort goes into making aesthetic choices appear individual and distinct, when they are actually studiously self-conscious.
Grayson Perry: Self-consciousness, I’m very interested in that. To be creative, you need to be unselfconscious. It’s like the sound barrier when you’re an art student. You have to reach the terminal velocity where you go through the sound barrier of self-consciousness, and then pop out the other side where you’re confident enough to handle it. A lot of people never make it through and that’s a real block to being creative. You’ve got to not give a shit.
Guernica: Moments in your show convey self-righteousness in taste. How do people use taste to demonstrate their morality?
Grayson Perry: Well, the British middle class particularly want to appear good people. In the past they would have gone to church, or they would have done good works for charity, or whatever. Now, you do organic, and you recycle. Mainly it’s lip service to green issues. Because the greenest thing you can do is nothing. The greenest things you can do are: a) not have children, and b) don’t go anywhere and don’t buy anything. Of course that will be an anathema to the middle classes. So it’s a sort of superficial morality on the whole, having an allotment full of vegetables that you probably never get round to eating because there’ll be too many all at once.
Guernica: You make a distinction between displaying cultural capital and being showy with your money, but isn’t it all about consumption, fundamentally?
Grayson Perry: It’s all about status. Cultural capital is something you accrue, and it’s a subtle thing. Middle-class people in particular are more aware of it. They want the culture they consume to sort of rub off on them somehow. A big part of culture is to be seen to be consuming it.
by Henry Peck, Guernica | Read more:
Image: uncredited
