Reith lectures 2013: Grayson Perry

[jean]

I'm always a little surprised that people somehow assume that artists create work without any collaboration or assistance...

I certainly don't think that, but I do think that the collaborators deserve more recognition for their part in the process than they currently get.

But I also think that the contribution to the finished work of the artist who earns all the money can vary a lot - I slid out of this discussion earlier when I could not find the right words to distinguish between Henry Moore making maquettes which were then reproduced on a much larger scale, and Marc Quinn having the idea of placing a sculpture of Alison Lapper on the fourth plinth, a sculpture whose physical form owed nothing to the artist and everything to a sculptor whose name we don't even know.

Which brings us to

Was it not the case (sorry to be bit late coming in on this) that there was not the same concept of 'authorship' that we have now in all branches of art. In medieval times a 'master' would have his studio but his own name would not necessarily be any better known than that of his apprentices who contributed to the masterpiece?

There are probably a number of reasons for this; we had not yet learned to distinguish between art and craft (as GP reminded us, the Greek word techne had to do for both); it was all for the glory of God and it was irrelevant who made it. This has sometimes been adduced as an argument that no artist is any 'better' an artist than any other - but you don't have to look at many medieval frescoes to note differences in quality between them, which I don't think contemporaries would have been entirely unaware of even without the signature.

(GP, citing Picasso's All children are artists, countered with Some of them are terrible artists though he did go on to list the ways in which their spontaneity and lack of selfconsciousness might work in their favour.)