The Adoration of the Cage Fighters (from The Vanity of Small Differences)

A landmark work in Grayson Perry’s oeuvre, The Adoration of the Cage Fighters (2012) is the first in a series of six monumental tapestries that the artist created under the collective title The Vanity of Small Differences. An extraordinary meditation on social mobility in twenty-first-century Britain, these works represent a modern-day response to William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century satirical masterpiece The Rake’s Progress. Hogarth’s eight paintings and related etchings tell the story of Tom Rakewell, a wealthy heir who squanders his inheritance on riotous living. Perry’s re-imagining reverses this narrative, following the fictional ‘Tim Rakewell’ on a journey from his working-class roots—depicted in the present work—to fame and fortune. The characters and scenes that populate the series were directly inspired by the artist’s 2012 Channel 4 documentary All in the Best Possible Taste, which saw him discuss themes of taste and class with diverse social groups across the UK. Works from the edition, including the present, have been widely exhibited over the past decade, with a complete set of all six held in the Arts Council Collection, London.

Set in Tim's great-grandmother's front room, the present work depicts his early childhood. A monologue from his mother flows in a pink band throughout the entire tapestry, outlining her life, her family background and her circumstances. Perry describes the work's structure. ‘The infant Tim reaches for his mother’s smartphone’, he explains, ‘his rival for her attention. She is dressed up, ready for a night out with her four friends, who have perhaps already “been on the pre-lash”. Two “Mixed Martial Arts” enthusiasts present icons of tribal identity to the infant: a Sunderland A.F.C. football shirt and a miner’s lamp. In the manner of early Christian painting, Tim appears a second time in the work: on the stairs, as a four-year-old, facing another evening alone in front of a screen. Although this series of images developed very organically, with little consistent method, the religious reference was here from the start. I hear the echo of paintings such as Andrea Mantegna’s The Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1450).’

Riffing on the grand tapestries that Perry observed in some of Britain’s finest country houses, The Vanity of Small Differences extends the social and cultural enquiries that had long been central to his celebrated ceramic practice. The series’ title is a pun on Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘the narcissism of small differences’: the notion that the people we are most keen to distinguish ourselves from are in fact those with whom we share the most in common. The interviews that Perry conducted during the making of his documentary served to confirm this idea, highlighting the ways in which we are all ultimately more connected than we perhaps like to think. Indeed, for all Tim Rakewell’s societal ‘progress’, the final tapestry in the cycle concludes with a scene of him lying dead after a car crash. A smartphone, like the one he had once tried to grasp from his mother’s hands, is smashed on the ground beside him. For Perry—who, much like Tim Rakewell, transcended his working-class origins to achieve international celebrity status—the work seems to offer a poignant warning: a reminder that, whatever dizzying heights we may achieve, none of us are beyond life’s great equalising forces.