The Vanity of Small Differences

With Hilary Term recently ended, the Ertegun Scholars left Oxford behind for a day-trip to Birmingham, where we visited Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry’s exhibition, ‘The Vanity of Small Differences”. The exhibition is the fruit of Perry’s travels through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells, and the Cotswolds, where he spent time meeting and speaking to people from the working, middle, and upper classes for his television series ‘All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry’. The result of this pseudo-ethnographic undertaking is a stunning and poignant collection of six tapestries chronicling the life of the fictional Tim Rakewell and his climb through the ranks of British society.

Tim’s early life in working class Sunderland is depicted in the first two tapestries, The Adoration of the Cage Fighters and Agony in the Car Park (inspired by Mantegna’s Adoration of the Shepherds and Bellini’s Agony in the Garden). In the first he is clutched by his young mother who scowls at her smart phone in preparation for a night out on the town with her friends, musing on her lost opportunities for academic excellence and on the joblessness and unemployment plaguing the town. In the second, Tim, now of grammar school age, kneels along with his mother at the feet of his stepfather, who gave up his dream of a musical career to work at a call centre to support his wife and her young son.

The next two tapestries depict Tim’s flight from his working class past. In the third, The Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close (inspired by Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise), Tim, now a university student, flees with his stylish middle-class girlfriend, leaving behind his parents who have become gaudy imitations of the middle-class to which they’ve aspired. The pair arrive instead in his girlfriend’s parents’ dining room in Tunbridge Wells, bedecked in ostentatious representations of their middle-class taste and status. In the fourth tapestry, The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, Tim, his wife, and his two children sit happily in their rural second home which is full of objects of display of their newly-acquired middle-class taste – his wife’s stylish purse, a jar of organic jam, a cafetiere, Penguin mugs and novelty pillows (reading ‘Class Traitor’ and ‘Bourgeois and Proud’), their lovingly framed portraits of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Tim has just been told by his business partner that they have sold their software company for £270 million.

The fifth tapestry, The Upper Class at Bay, or An Endangered Species Brought Down, depicts Tim and his wife, now middle-aged, strolling in front of their mansion in the Cotswolds as protesters camping on his property demand he pay more taxes. In the foreground, a stag representing the old landed aristocracy, with a patched-up, tattered coat of tweed, is torn apart by rabid dogs – in their coats are written the words ‘upkeep’, ‘tax’, ‘social change’, and ‘fuel bills’. The final tapestry, #Lamentation, inspired by van der Weyden’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, shows the tragic end to Tim’s life – an older man, he lies dead in the arms of a stranger after having totaled his Ferrari in a street race, while his young trophy wife looks on, her Louis Vuitton purse and multiple credit cards lying scattered below Tim’s feet. Onlookers record the scene on their smart phones, while Tim’s own lies smashed beside him.

The exhibition is a surreal, somewhat grotesque, must-see visual commentary on class struggle, through ‘taste’ and consumerism, in modern Britain. Each tapestry is laden with intensely nuanced imagery, symbols of the class-specific tastes and self-display Perry investigated in the communities he visited – the many features of the iTunes App released in conjunction with the exhibit makes it clear that there is so much more cultural commentary embedded within each tapestry than we could perceive at first, second, or even third glance, as we were so overwhelmed by the vivid colours and often strangely-proportioned bodies. After this intense experience, it was almost a relief to leave the gallery, to discuss our thoughts over lunch in the museum’s Edwardian Tea Room, itself a splendid example of aspirational British taste.

–  Leah Bernardo-Ciddio