An unexpected spokesperson ... Grayson Perry at home. Photograph: Linda Nylind
It's shaping up to be a bit of a week for Grayson Perry. On Thursday he's joining the panel of Question Time in Bexhill-on-Sea, a hop, skip and a jump away from where Unpopular Culture, the Arts Council show he selected and curated, is on show. On Saturday, he'll be back there again for an exclusive In Conversation to discuss the exhibition. Given the often unusual choice of celebrity panellists on Question Time (we had Jerry Springer advising us on the European Union last week), we can expect Perry to raise a few eyebrows. But this time for all the right reasons. While the majority of the country will only know him by his tabloid persona (cross-dressing art weirdo), his choices for Unpopular Culture reveal the true Perry. If we need a spokesman for the state of the nation, I can think of no better candidate.
As he told Sean O'Hagan before the launch of the exhibition, his selection is "blatantly nostalgic", but he's being self-effacing, if not downright diffident in saying so. Martin Parr's shot of a rained-out Silver Jubilee street party is typical of the subtlety Perry brings to his selection. If he's nostalgic for anything, it's for a sense of shared community spirit that shines through in spite of the grim circumstances recorded in the post-war documentary photography of Thurston Hopkins, George Rodger, Tony Ray-Jones, Patrick Ward and Bert Hardy.
Perry has the nous to remove himself from Turner Prize-winning associations and to present us with an alternative idea of what constitutes "BritArt". While there are plenty of big names in the show, his real achievement is in revealing how, say, Henry Moore or Eduardo Paolozzi fall into place alongside the many forgotten artists he's given fresh exposure to.
While the show's brochure stresses that the exhibited work is bookended by two huge events in the British psyche - the end of World War Two and the beginning of Thatcherism - in his own video introduction Perry stresses a very different endpoint: mass media saturation.
I could go on all day. Perry's exhibition is the best-curated show I've seen in years (all the better for its location in the De La Warr Pavilion; bleak seascape, flapping Union Jacks et al). It's on until 6 July. If you live too far from Bexhill to see it, do the next best thing: listen to him on Question Time tonight and ask yourself if he isn't the one member of the panel you'd trust to run the country.
