They’ve certainly picked a surprising venue for it. Lives Less Ordinary, an exhibition that critiques and claims to rectify the representation of British working-class life, occupies the wood-panelled, gothic-windowed mansion Two Temple Place, built in the 1890s as a London pad for millionaire William Waldorf Astor. Photos and paintings of common people are hung around a hall that looks like the grand staircase of the Titanic.
It’s a curious sight and even curiouser exhibition. The British working class, says the press release, are seen in art “through the reductive and distorting lens of the middle-class gaze. Working-class subjects have been … stereotyped or sensationalised. Working-class artists have been misinterpreted, pigeonholed, or overlooked altogether”. Which artists are they accusing? Richard Billingham, I suspect, whose photobook Ray’s a Laugh portrays drunken squalor inside the council flat where he grew up, and Martin Parr, whose pictures of seaside life tend to be toe-curling. Yet both are lyrical, memorable artists of real British life. Just not with a sufficiently positive attitude.
