In a society that claims to open up access to culture and continues to provide a model to follow on what is culturally and intellectually acceptable from what is not, Deller gets away and plays with these societal stereotypes by focusing on subcultures, folklore, people. It’s like a modern equivalent of Blake’s Jerusalem where someone arrives on a golden chariot during the Industrial Revolution to proclaim the future. In work that is playful, political and provocative, borrowing from many forms and produced over many mediums, Jeremy Deller enjoys critical acclaim in the UK and across the world. Perhaps it is that painful intensity that electrifies his prose, which comes across as crystalline, athletic, earnest yet frequently funny.

To this end, it is designed, he says, “to look a bit like one of those annuals you’d get for Christmas when you were a kid”.

Tinged with an assertive socio-political discourse, his works make a link between culture—vernacular or mass—and the world of work. To me, my work is quite obvious in a way, more obvious than a lot of contemporary art, but it is definitely conceptual insofar as I start with an idea and see what happens.

With conversations between the artist and an eclectic mix of cultural figures and collaborators, from fashion provocateur Sportsbanger to classicist Mary Bear, the book offers an unpredictable and exhilarating tour of Deller’s life and works. Jeremy Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004, represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2013 – and participated in the first Folkestone Triennial in 2008.In Art is Magic , Turner Prize - winning artist Jeremy Deller brings together for the first time key works from his career alongside the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired him. It is divided into three sections: a visual guide through his favourite work, in-depth reflections on his life and art and, finally, a scrapbook of images to explain what drives him (from Rod Stewart to bats, the perfect jukebox to neolithic axe heads).

Interviews with figures as diverse as Mary Beard and Jonny Banger punctuate Deller’s reflections, as do artworks from numerous contemporaries of Deller’s, including Nick Abrahams, Tasha Amini, Olivier Antoine of Art Concept, Cecilia Bengolea and Sean Bidder. Look closely and you realise Street is also wearing his middleweight wrestling championship title belt. Putin’s Happy is a case in point, but also Father and Son, which was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and comprised lifesize wax candles of Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, which slowly melted over 12 hours in a deconsecrated Melbourne church.I generally have five or six books on the go – at the moment this includes a biography of Keynes, a collection of papers on participation in democracy, the Power of Strangers, Rewilding, the latest Weird Walk journal and, a much appreciated present, the Definitive Desert Island Discs. The book features work from across Deller's life and art and includes Sacrilege, the inflatable Stonehenge, the Iggy Pop Life Class, The Battle of Orgreave, a recreation of a confrontation from the Miners' Strike, bats (a subject in at least three of Deller's works), Andy Warhol (whom he met in 1986), rave culture, hen harriers pecking out the eyes of a Tory MP, and a giant Chameleon slide. data-background-images="{}" data-background-type="image" data-video-loop="true" data-video-play-only-visible="true" data-video-lazy-load="true" data-video-fallback-src="" data-element="inner" data-pb-style="G8XVEJQ">