Perry gives us interesting insights into the art world — thus the clever title — and into his thought processes as an artist, and how these evolved from his days in art college to his current status as, in his words, "a fully paid-up member of the Establishment".
One of the issues that artists have to confront, he says, is self-consciousness — trying to decide how they relate to art's weighty history, and whether to be ironic about it, or ignore it, or take some other stance. Similarly, the artist has to decide their stance toward fame, popularity, and money. He says "perhaps the most shocking tactic that's left to artists these days is sincerity". He admits that, underneath his own jocularity, irony and cynicism, the hidden engine that keeps him going is "an indistinct glowing ball of creative energy" which he has to "nurse through the assault course of becoming and growing as an artist".
Would it be surprising if composers faced similar issues?
Perry makes it clear that the concept of avant-garde is dead. Just about anything that could be tried was tried before 1980, so that it's now hard for young artists to "break the mould". They must live in an age of pluralism where anything goes, where there is no cutting edge, and you can hardly shock anyone.
Surely this ought to be true in the music world, too. I remember a composition from the early seventies which consisted of placing a sheaf of music paper in a trash can and then machine-gunning it. Just about anything else you can think of which might be tangentially related to composition has been done. Yet the public is way behind — so far behind that most people consider early 20th-century masterpieces to be "terribly modern". (Someone recently described me as "a Canadian composer of avant-garde music", thus managing to be wrong twice in the same sentence.)
And this leads me back to a theme I've played many times: the big difference between the art world and the music world is the audience's attention span. Perry, like David Stubbs, says there is a vast amount of money sloshing around the art world and millions of eager visitors to modern-art museums. But at the same time, almost no one (including most artists) wants to consider non-pop music as an art form whose contemporary creators deserve to be heard. Almost every artist would be aghast if his art were treated as entertainment, as pleasurable wallpaper, but most people treat music that way.
But I have digressed. I enjoyed Perry's book, and recommend it.