The Spitalfields Festival

Women Sing East led by Laka D is a must for us and we see them every year
Jazz, Blues, scruffy St Leonard's rather than sterile ChristChurch

.www.spitalfieldsmusic.org.uk/whats-on/summer-festival-2013/.../118/

My talk about Spitalfields

I was invited to give an introduction about Spitalfields to a small group of people in one of the local libraries.  They were mostly older people, but all active. One was just about to go to America, one Spain bound for the summer, another wanted me to help sell some swimming costumes he was knocking up.  An interested, involved audience
There was no fee offered for my presence, nor any expected.

The talk was successful and I was then given a raffle ticket- I had won 2 biro pens!   A friend who had come along to give me some encouragement won a spatula.  She waved it triumphantly in the air- I haven't got one with a handle like that she said. I came home to hear the news about members of the House of Lords.  All retired and expecting thousands of pounds for unspecified services.  Same ages as my audience, very different expectations.  Spatulas all round!

Grayson Perry on taste and class

The ambience of the estate was maintained by a mixture of contractual obligation (“no caravans”) and communal taboos (“no net curtains”). Talking to the residents, I found a genuine community spirit, but I sensed that for all of the convenience, security and luxury of their lifestyle, true middle-class status, if they actually wanted it, was beyond an intangible exclusion barrier. What that divide is made of, I think, is largely culture and education. The people basking on the sunlit uplands of the chattering classes have either passed through this miasmic barrier at university, or were born beyond it, where people just seem to know how to be fully middle class. Crucially, they understand that despite all the rules about taste that they have picked up by osmosis – when to wear shorts, what to name one’s child, what to serve at a kitchen supper – none of them matters; one can flout them all as long as, and this is paramount, everyone knows you are doing it on purpose. So I can buy a Porsche and have it gold-plated, but it has to be full of rubbish and dog hair, and I must NEVER, EVER wash it.

Another driver of taste that I noticed among the upper middle class was the desire to show the world that one was an upright moral citizen. In the past, a good burgher might have regularly attended church or done voluntary work; today they buy organic, recycle, drive an electric car or deny their child television. This need to pay inconvenient penance to society seems to come partly from guilt. The liberal, educated middle class have done well, but they must pay with hard labour on their allotment, or by cycling to work.

Professional aesthetes in deconstructed suits and statement spectacles would love it if there were strict overarching rules of good taste. I fear they search in vain. I started my research with a full set of prejudices about the “inferior” taste of the working class I had left behind. I now find myself agreeing with the cultural critic Stephen Bayley that good taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Shared taste helps bind the tribe. It signals to fellow adherents of a particular subculture that you understand the rules. Within the group of, say, modified hatchback drivers, there is good and bad taste in loud cars in much the same way as there is good and bad taste in installations within the art world. Outsiders may find it baffling or irritating, but that is of less importance to insiders than impressing one’s peers.

Grayson Perry’s tapestry series The Vanity of Small Differences is on show at the RA, London W1, until August 18. The Arts Council Collection tour of The Vanity of Small Differences starts at Sunderland Museum on June 28.