The Vanity of Small Differences is an Arts Council Collection Touring exhibition, jointly owned by Arts Council Collection,Southbank Centre, London and British Council. Gift of the artist and VictoriaMiro Gallery with the support of Channel 4 Television, the Art Fund andSfumato Foundation with additional support from Alix Partners. The Vanity of Small Differences is a Hayward Touring exhibition. The Vanity of Small Differences was gifted to the British Council Collection and the Arts Council Collection by the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery with the support of Channel 4 Television and the Art Fund, and additional support from AlixPartners. Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! reviewed by Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times

Visitors admire the Expulsion From Number 8 Eden Close tapestry. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Imagestherefore be one of the ‘moral’ lessons of this exhibition, which Christians would also uphold. We do not need to defend our uniqueness because we are upheld by God.

And again, doesn’t the fact that we live in an apparently mobile society mean that there is, as in Perry’s case, a good deal of movement between classes, and therefore perhaps a confusion about class identity. To what extent are the things which I possess, enjoy, value and seek out, influenced by class or by individual choice? We seem to have here, another version of the free-will debate. In matters of taste and behaviour how much is conditioned by class and how much by free choice? Clearly self-knowledge may be important in resolving such an issue. And as part of the debate might we also challenge Perry’s assumptions about class? He has clearly grown up deeply conscious of class, but is our society moving beyond class as a significant factor in our make up? Accepting the beliefs (and difficulties) outlined above, Christians commit themselves to working out those beliefs in their own life through a process of self-knowledge, service of neighbour and community, prayer and worship. Prayer and worship might be seen as, in part, creating the space for self-knowledge.The processes at work in this story are complex because there is a part played by the grace or influence of God and a part played by our own free will. The complexity resides in the fact that we find it difficult to distinguish between the roles played by God and by ourselves. The easiest (but perhaps not the most helpful) way of making this distinction has been to say that whatever is good in my life is brought about by God’s grace, and whatever is bad is the result of my free will. Nevertheless, while we cannot say that God is ever the cause of evil, we might not want to see ourselves simply as puppets doing whatever good God chooses for us to do. Such a view can for example lead to the corresponding idea that whatever I do that is wrong has been caused by the manipulation of an evil force – the devil or a demon pulling the strings.

Grayson Perry. Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012. Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 x 400 cm (78 3/4 x 157 1/2 in), edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. A small display (23 February – 3 June 2018) of photographs and spreads from one of Perry's early photo albums. Stephen Willats and Grayson Perry feature in Do I Have to Draw You a Picture? at Heong Gallery, Cambridge Grayson Perry All Man earns the artist best presenter and best arts programme prizes at the RTS awards.We refuse a verbal discourse on class, except in our Marxist enclaves, but instead visually signal class difference, indeed class gradations, to each other all the time. Perry's TV series last year All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry was a blast of class consciousness, just when we are in deep denial about this reality. Of all the things I expected to come out of the series, the last would have been tapestries. Somehow this is perfect, though. Something old, something new; digitally produced by looms, the tapestries together entitled The Vanity of Small Differences are arty and crafty. They use humour to depict loss and joy and a pervading sense of anxiety. In 2010, author Christopher Hitchens cited the phenomenon when talking about ethno-national conflicts. [10] "In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions."

And so, it might be said that their way forward is to be found by coming out of hiding before God. And in the process, they will discover that God is not, as they suppose, waiting to condemn them, but to recreate them if they are prepared to work with him. Honest self-knowledge is the process of coming out of hiding. And that process is made possible by the fact that God has given us a God-like life which we might put on – the life focussed by Jesus living such a life in a particular time and place which has to be recreated for us and in us by the Holy Spirit acting in our own particular time and place. The Upper Class at Bay”, 2012. Wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 X 400 cm. British Council Collection. Thinking about class in this way, older readers might be reminded of the Class sketch from the Frost Report in 1966 acted out by John Cleese and the two Ronnies. ‘Cleese: I look down on him because I am upper-class. Grayson Perry writes in the Guardian and reveals two new works ahead of his Serpentine Galleries show The contemporary comic genre contains many novel and sophisticated artistic expressions. Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning MAUS and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, winner of the 1991 World Fantasy Award for short fiction, could be called fine art storytelling.1 And the comics drawn by Chris Ware in his Acme Novelty Library would find a comfortable home among fine art books.The exhibition (11 November 2022–26 March 2023) includes ceramics, sculptures in wood and metal, prints, monumental tapestries and embroideries. Thus while offering social commentary on class in Britain, Perry is along the way reflecting on secularisation understood as the loss of religious belief as an integrating force in society and giver of meaning on a personal level. Here I sense in his work a self-aware religious nostalgia. There was no golden age of religion, when all held hands in national unity, just as there was no working-class idyll for Tim Rakewell. But there remains a deep religious longing for something which would give the course of our lives more coherence than a night on the town, a day spent surfing online, and the pursuit of wealth and possessions. Held at the Royal Scottish Academy, the exhibition (22 July–12 November 2023) will encompass more than 80 works from across his career. There is, however, something problematic about Perry’s approach, and about the view point from which he looks at the subject. He describes himself as a working class, grammar school boy, who may have moved up the greasy pole to live in Islington, but is still deeply influenced by Essex. He can still refer to himself as an ‘oik’. The main difficulty, however, in talking about class is obviously the extent to which one’s own class influences the way in which one views the subject. Is it possible to talk about class, as it were from the outside, as an observer, as Perry seems to be doing? THE Vanity of Small Differences” is an exhibition of six huge tapestries by Grayson Perry, each of which, inspired by William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, charts a stage in the journey of social mobility made by young Tim Rakewell (a wry reference to Tom Rakewell, Hogarth’s protagonist). The tapestries include many of the characters, incidents, and objects that Perry encountered on journeys through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells, and the Cotswolds when filming All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, a series on social class for Channel 4.