Grayson Perry, known primarily for cross-dressing, but who also does quite a good line in pottery and paintings is Channel 4’s go-to arts presenter. And with good reason. His direct style and unpretentious approach to the craft that he loves is hugely engaging and it’s put to perfect use in this lockdown art club.
Reviewing the final episode of six, Anita Singh in The Telegraph thinks Art Club is a “celebration of eccentricity, humour and just getting on with it. It has been one of the most joyous bits of television made during lockdown, a tonic amid all the gloom.” The New Statesman’s Anna Leszkiewicz says there’s a “homespun informality to the whole affair. This is appropriate for a programme that insists that art – not the lofty, grand kind of art that sits only in gilt frames in expensive capital cities, but the kind that you and I can make in our homes, here and now – might help us through this crisis.” In the Independent Lucy Jones writes that this is the excuse we all need to find our inner child and the show “suggests we’re all hungering for more creativity in our lives, or at least permission to try.” And listen-up readers, she goes on to say, “If we watch the entirety of Netflix, could we be missing out on the intrinsic human pleasure of making something ourselves?”
Sounds to us like a recommendation to use MustWatch and choose your viewing carefully – that’ll create the space in all our lives for some Art Club with Grayson.
First shown April 2020.