Art Moves Online at Yoox
“I’m not interested in art that’s stuck in galleries,” says artist Grayson Perry. “I think that‘s one of the terrible handicaps of a lot of contemporary art—that it’s only made to look good in galleries.”
Today, with the launch of Art at yoox.com, everyone has an opportunity to own and incorporate Perry’s work into his or her own home. Perry and fellow Turner Prize-winning artist Damien Hirst have created the first exclusive works to be made available online through the already established fashion and design platform, along with other offerings from the Tate, Magnum Photos, and Other Criteria.
Through his boxed set of table mats, entitled The Vanity of Small Differences, Perry explores themes of class and taste in contemporary British society. He envisages his art to live in people’s homes, and his table mats are no exception. “I encountered table mates in all parts of society, protecting a glass coffee table in a hairdressers house, pseudo-ironically arrayed on a vintage dining table and casually strewn ready for breakfast for a man who owns a castle and six thousand acres,” Perry explains.
Hirst, no stranger to the dialogue surrounding the commodification of art, presents two small-scale versions of Anatomy of an Angel, his original sculpture inspired by Alfred Boucher’s L’Hirondelle (1920), as well as other works exclusively designed for the site.