The Vanity of Small Differences is jointly owned by the Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London and the British Council Collection. Gift of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, with the support of Channel 4 Television, the Art Fund and Sfumato Foundation with additional support from Alix Partners.

At a time when social mobility has ground to a halt – when inequality booms and cannot be bust – Perry reminds us of how we tell each other who we are and who we belong to. In these conservative times, this is a radical thing to be doing. That is why this work is important. Sometimes things not only look good; they are good. I am making a moral judgment here, but then I recognise myself – my flaws, my dreams – in these tapestries of joy and despair, of ugliness and beauty. 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.On view until 20 March 2022, the exhibition features works from the collection along with new works by the artist. Expulsion From Number 8 Eden Close, 2012. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London All of these mixed emotions surface when I see Grayson Perry's work. I loved my mum, I hated our house; I couldn't wait for a room of my own, yet now I see how, though I escaped, so much of her remains with me. I see her social position against mine. I hate the word "journey"; rather, these tapestries are a bracing walk through that taboo subject: class.

Perry has always worked with traditional media; ceramics, cast iron, bronze, printmaking and tapestry. He is interested in how each historic category of object accrues over time intellectual and emotional baggage. Tapestry is the art form of grand houses: depicting classical myths, historical and religious scenes and epic battles. In this series of works Perry plays with idea of using this ancient allegorical art to elevate the commonplace dramas of modern British life.There is much more that could be said about Christian belief but enough has been provided with which to explore the thoughts behind ‘The Vanity of Small Differences.’ For a start Perry invites us ‘to come out of hiding’ in terms of our own sense of the group/tribe/class we belong to. These things contribute to our sense of self identity but may also cut us off from other people, preventing us from understanding their way of life and causing us to criticise or despise it. The title of the exhibition is derived, according to Perry, from Freud’s phrase ‘the narcissism of small differences’, ‘alluding to the fact that we often most passionately defend our uniqueness when differentiating ourselves from those who are very nearly the same as us.’ Why, we might wonder, has Perry replaced the word ‘narcissism’ with ‘vanity’ in his title? Narcissism is a form of intense self-regard. Vanity, in this context, might have a double meaning: vanity as a form of self-regard, but vanity also as something futile or empty. These differences don’t matter and we ought to be spending more time contemplating what we have in common. And this might

The exhibition (11 November 2022–26 March 2023) includes ceramics, sculptures in wood and metal, prints, monumental tapestries and embroideries. Below: Grayson Perry. The Agony in the Car Park, 2012 (detail). Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Made in parallel with a Channel 4 documentary series, All in the Best Possible Taste, they are crammed with acutely-observed detail and invite us all to consider our own attitudes to class and our positions in society. The reason this becomes problematic for the middle classes is because, as Perry points out, they are acutely self-conscious. "No better than they ought to be," as we used to say, though they do try. For class is embedded in culture and culture is ever-evolving – it contains what Raymond Williams identified as dominant (existing), residual and emergent elements. All of these are woven into Perry's tapestries: what was there; what should be there; what will be there. The cultural struggle is always over meaning. The middle class remains both unknown to itself and fearful that what is valuable may disappear. This sense of loss is mysterious but hangs over Perry's work. Barker: I look up to him because he is upper-class; but I look down on him because he is lower-class. I am middle-class.The touring exhibition (19 September 2021–30 January 2022) developed by the Holburne Museum in Bath, is the first to celebrate Grayson Perry’s earliest forays into the art world and re-introduces the works he made between 1982 and 1994. The Vanity of Small Differencesis A beautiful publication, covered with real cloth,accompanying the Hayward Touring exhibition with the same name. The bookfeatures Perry’s six vibrant and highly detailed tapestries bearing the influence bothof early Renaissance painting and of William Hogarth’s moralising series, literallyweaving characters, incidents and objects from the artist’s research into a modern dayversion of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress(1733). Art is a process. It’s expressing yourself and doing something, and throwing yourself into it and getting better at it and trying again. That’s what it’s about. And people are responding to that now.' In this interview feature, Perry talks about Grayson's Art Club and subsequent exhibition. What I found was the fantasy of the life she would have led, had she been able, compared with the mundane one she ended up with. She was a good-looking woman, who had married an American and lived in the US. So, although solidly working class, she had glimpsed another life and tried to grasp hold of it. She was glamorous to me. I found shoes – deconstructed wedges that make Vivienne Westwood's look tame; zebra‑skin handbags; amber cigarette holders for those sophisticated menthols. Oh yes, and a load of absolute tat. For, towards the end of her life, when she ran out of money and the men who would provide it, she became a hunter-gatherer at car boot sales, where the line between treasure and trash is fine indeed. Six large tapestries exploring the British fascination with taste and class by one of the UK’s best-known and best-loved artists – Grayson Perry.

In the North East, “shipbuilding bound the town together like a religion. When Thatcher closed the yards down it ripped the heart out of the community.” The point behind the political point: Christian religion as cohesive force in society was lost long before shipbuilding was lost. When Tim is middle aged and his mother has died, it is therapy and not the church which provides direction for his new-found desire to “be good” in the wake of a reminder of his own mortality.William Hogarth’s set of eight paintings The Rake’s Progress (1733) is a tale of moral descent and personal failure, in which the protagonist, Tom Rakewell, dies debt-ridden in a madhouse. Taking inspiration from Hogarth, Perry invents a character Tim Rakewell , whose ascent of the ladder of social mobility – from working class boy to British Bill Gates – is depicted in six great tapestries. Tim does not end in the madhouse, but at the roadside, having sped his Ferrari into a lamppost, not wearing his seatbelt. Of course the irresponsible driving suggests, as in Hogarth’s tale, a moral lesson. Yet Perry’s point is not to moralise, but to open our eyes to the phenomenon of class difference, to which we are on some levels blind. Grayson Perry All Man earns the artist best presenter and best arts programme prizes at the RTS awards. The Dean views Perry as “a magpie-like figure — taking ideas and imagery from a range of sources — making use of archetypes without simply singling out medieval sacred art”. Nevertheless, the fact that works of sacred art inspired these tapestries, and that tapestry itself is an art-form that the cathedral’s early custodians would have been familiar with, and was used to bring religious stories to life and depict historical events, means that, when the tapestries are shown in this space, these connections and references are activated and animated in ways that wouldn’t otherwise occur. As a result, showing Perry’s tapestries here proves to be an inspired move.