"Gasping death-rattle of mediocrity..."
It's had about the worst Press reviews imaginable - but is the 2024 RA Summer Exhibition THAT bad?
Once it was a highlight of the year for Britain’s royals. Monarchs came for private views; London society fought over tickets to the accompanying banquet and the Royal Academy accounts show the payments they had to make to the Metropolitan Police to hire officers to keep the crowds under control.
How things have changed! When I was there for the Sunday preview for Friends of the Royal Academy, the place was so quiet at 11-30 that you could have fired a shotgun across the foyer without serious risk of injury. (In fact, if you did, you’d probably get an Arts Council grant for performance art and a mention in the catalogue).
It’s been a few years now since I actually enjoyed a Summer Exhibition. Only recognising the work of few lovely old-timers (Ken Howard was always a thrill, now passed away, but Olwyn Bowen soldiers on with her wonderful garden studies) kept my interest going and persuaded me to renew my Friends membership each year. So I was good and ready to whizz round the 2024 show in a few minutes and come out blustering and moaning about the death of art.
But wait - that wasn’t my reaction. Contrary to everything I had read, 2024 is by no means the worst Summer Exhibition I remember.
Walking round the various galleries among the 1,700 catalogued works was a bit like wild-swimming in Britain’s rivers - OK if you can ignore all the crap. As I paddled round the galleries, it turned out there was much more to catch the eye than I feared, having read the critics from the Telegraph (A heap of tedious, shambling parochialism and humdrum bilge, this year’s show may well be a new low) and the Guardian, which contended that the state of the exhibition was the result of 14 years of Tory misrule (honestly!). I’ll give you a quid for every Tory you can find sitting on the RA’s selection panel which viewed the 16,000 works which were submitted.
In a way, digging out the gems is rather fun. If you have never been to the Summer Exhibition, then this is a good year to try it because the impact of the various galleries is extraordinary. Clouds of artworks of all kinds are hung across the walls and as high as the ceilings. They range from “sculptures” larger than a living room to micro-paintings not much bigger than your iPhone. And yet, in this visual cacophony, brilliantly clever or superbly accomplished artworks manage to jump out of the crowd to catch attention.
There’s a delicious painting (Cafe in Riga) about the size of a laptop screen, by a Lithuanian called Giedre Kazlauskaite, which I found stunning. Melissa Scott-Miller, an urban landscape painter, has two tremendous paintings which appeal to me hugely. You will find a wall of cat portraits, if that’s your thing. There are numerous limited edition print works (my favourite is the blue guinea fowl) which can be bought for less than £100. And that’s the other fascination of the Summer Exhibition to me. Virtually all of the works are for sale, some at comparatively modest prices. Other are obviously master works for five figure sums, and some priced so that you can hear the visitors laughing out loud as they pass by!
There are fewer portraits than I’d personally like and some which have made the cut made me wish they hadn’t. We all have our personal definitions of what makes art? Mine includes skill, endeavour, story and obvious intellectual content as well as visual impact. So about 50% of all the works in this show fail, for me, on several of those points. And if I could sweep away all the works which don’t hit all my five points, the show’s dozen or so galleries could probably be replaced by just one.
But where would be the fun in that? My knock-out painting might be your “my cat could do better than that” horror. The key is to pop along and see for yourself.
Those with wider tastes than mine, who relish a good old-fashioned video installation, might pop in to the Small Weston Room, but be careful, it’s pitch-dark in there. I barked my shin on the sharp wooden seating before I settled down to watch Carey Young’s The Vision Machine - an HD video of Japanese women carefully polishing camera lenses in a Tokyo lens factory. Gripping though lens polishing is, the ache in my bum from the wooden seating overwhelmed the pain in my shin long before the video ran out.
One of my favourite aspects of the show is that it has a whole Gallery devoted to architecture, industry and concept models. This year’s hall, curated by Ann Christopher, is a delightful and eclectic mix. I loved the wattle and daub beehive - a low carbon hive for City bees - and the tiny model, in immaculate detail, of a horse stable.
It’s distressingly easy to poke fun at the RA for the way it has allowed the Summer Exhibition to develop since the time when it was a blockbuster showing of Britain’s finest and most talented artists. Hard to imagine now that mainstream magazines and newspapers produced special editions, which sold in hundreds of thousands.
But the Exhibition is still very important for one reason - it’s a big funder of the RA. It costs £40 to enter your work. And visitors pay £22. That’s an enormous cash boost for the Academy, which is independent of Government and is an institution about which we should feel protective and which we should cherish.
The old lady of art been at the centre of British culture for two and a half centuries. She’s probably entitled to pick up her skirts and act a little daft once a year.
The Royal Academy’s 256th Summer Exhibition can be visited Tuesdays to Sundays until August 18, 2024. Burlington House Piccadilly Mayfair London W1J 0BD
Melissa Scott Miller is a fine artist.
I confess I read the review from the Guardian ("It is a gasping death-rattle of mediocrity, a miserable garden party of vapid good taste.") and confess that I was somewhat put off a visit this year! I always find it rather fun, if exasperating, seeking out the gems and thought how I would feel if I had put in this year and read that...Thank you for offering a counter balance and a great read.