JEREMY DELLER IS INVITING LONDON TO A PARTY IT WON'T FORGET...

...and 'it's going to be like Bruegel meets the Simpsons,' says the Turner Prize-winning artist of his free Trafalgar Square knees-up. Martin Robinson meets him to find out quite how he got there

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Jeremy Deller is walking rapidly through the English painting room at the National Gallery, past the aristocratic portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, before he settles in front of a William Hogarth set called Marriage Ala-Mode (1743-45), which charts the ups and downs — mostly downs — of an ill-matched society couple.

It’s all drunkenness, party aftermaths, slumped syphilitic society figures, diseased faces, the buttocks of an adulterous man fleeing out of a window, a disgraced woman downing laudanum. “This,” says Deller, gesturing to the other paintings, “is how we want to be seen, but Hogarth paints people as they really are.”

Deller is whispering intently about, “Greed, vanity, lust... all these things Hogarth depicted... we like to think we have changed since then, but we haven't.”

His next destination is Nicolas Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan, with its woodland bacchanal, Deller quietly marveling at the sex, the drinking, the violence, “the physicality, the celebratory feeling and the atmosphere of abandon”.

And with this little tour of these wild and true artworks, we arrive at why Deller is here. Which is that to mark the bicentenary of the National, the Turner Prize winner is holding a huge free party in Trafalgar Square this Saturday. Titled The Triumph of Art, it is a public revelry beginning at 11am with a parade along Whitehall to the square, where a carnival of performances, music and general mayhem will take place. It is the climax to a nationwide series of events by Deller and the National, that have dovetailed with local culture and folklore and politics, such as one in Derry, Northern Ireland which showcased the bands who played there during the Troubles. This final London happening is, quite simply, not to be missed.