Summer show lacks talent

Red Flowers by John Bellany RA - one of his "crass self-hackeries"
The Weekender

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The 235th Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is upon us and, to put it bluntly, I groan at having to review it, but it is news of a sort - news as expected and familiar as the Chelsea Flower Show - and cannot be ignored.

Of the 234th exhibition I wrote that it was remarkable only in that its exhibits were even more vapid, shallow, lifeless, repetitious, hackneyed and habitual than those of the 233rd, that they embraced every idiom from kitsch to taxidermy, and that the Academy's determination to promote every aspect of British art supported by the twin Tates on the Thames resulted only in the dampest squib. Even so, the total value of the sales amounted to £2.13 million.

I dare say much the same figure will be reached again this year, for there are so-called collectors who buy pictures from no other source and who fondly believe that a painting or sculpture displayed in the Academy has, by virtue of that fact, some guarantee of mystical quality.

Alas for them, the truth is nothing of the kind: the only guarantees are that in most cases, as with a new car (but even worse), the presumed work of art is immediately worth less than the price paid and that thousands and thousands of purchases from the Academy, particularly over the past half-century, have proved to have no substantial second-hand market.

Perhaps this has always been the case, for though the objective of the Summer Exhibition as outlined in the RA's Charter of 1768 is nobly stated as "open to all artists of distinguished merit, where they may offer their performances to public inspection and acquire that degree of reputation and encouragement which they shall be deemed to deserve", it always had sales as the sub-plot.

The idea of "distinguished merit" was swiftly, if not entirely, abandoned, undermined in favour of artists whose work would readily sell, but which in today's terms would have been better hung on the railings of Green Park.

The Academy always needed money, for, from its very beginning, the commission from the sales was intended to fund the Schools in which such luminaries as Fuseli and Turner taught such others as Landseer and Rossetti in an attempt to sustain the traditions of academic art.

"We apprehend," wrote the would-be Royal Academicians to George III in 1768, seeking his Charter, "that the profits arising from [the exhibition] will fully answer all the expenses [of the Schools]; we even flatter ourselves that they will be more than necessary for the purpose ..."

That once worthy objective is, however, now so diminished - both in the number of students, initially 250 or so but now only 55, and in their achievement - that to the onlooker its continuance seems pointless. Thirty years ago, the RA Schools were distinct from the Royal College, the Slade, Goldsmiths and the few provincial art schools of any reputation (now fewer still), but within a decade that distinction had begun to blur; now it no longer exists and the work of the student at the RA has depressing kinships with the whims, technical incompetence and intellectual fatuity fostered in all other schools.

It may be that the Royal Charter is the only thing that obliges the Academy to continue with its Schools - certainly, in terms of a business (which is what the RA has become), it would be more profitable without them.

I raise the matter of the Schools because, in the futile annual effort to rouse interest in the Summer Exhibition, the RA has devoted an entire gallery to the work of students and recent graduates, not only from their own Schools (for in these there are too few), but from Goldsmiths, the Slade and the Royal College. The result is appalling. It is to be hoped that medical students make a better fist of learning to be doctors.

One disadvantage of surrendering a gallery to students is that the number of pictures sent in by open submission is cut by the loss of that much hanging space. But it is also cut by the amount of work sent in by invited artists and by the Academicians, 106 of them, each entitled to hang six pictures or put six sculptures on their plinths, accounting for as much as half the 1,242 exhibits.

It is further cut by giving one enormous gallery only to architects' models, in addition to the usual smaller gallery, and by devoting the Central Hall to a memorial exhibition in honour of the Barcelona sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who died last year.

Only in Galleries VII and VIII do open submissions have primacy; elsewhere, as in the South Rooms, they must share space with Academicians.

Some 8,000 poor souls spent £18 on every work submitted, paying the Academy something like £150,000 for the chance to occupy perhaps 200 places. Such trafficking in hope is good for business. So, too, is the 30 per cent commission on sales. Clearly the Academy has nothing to learn from its sponsors, a management consultancy.

More than £70,000 is available in prize money - a huge sum compared with the Turner Prize - for "artists of exceptional merit". The largest dollop of spondulicks, £25,000, is awarded for "the most distinguished work in the exhibition", an annual game of hunt the thimble usually won by an Academician on the principle of Buggins' Turn.

This year the short list consists of six works so unnoticeable that one must deliberately hunt for them, only to emit an "Oh" of deflated expectation. One of them is by Jake and Dinos Chapman, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, a bronze model on the cuddly scale of a chocolate elephant softening in the heat.

It is an absurd object of absolutely no distinction; it is entirely without merit, aesthetic or philosophical; hardly even a joke or insult, it merely demonstrates how low the Academy is prepared to sink in its desperation to gain publicity by exploiting notoriety.

It is not the worst thing in the exhibition. The object with the best claim to that title is by the President of the Royal Academy himself, Philip King, who has the impertinence to ask £11,000 for a fetish confection of feathers, slivers of slate, bundles of brushstraw and other bamboozling bits and bobs with which a pseudoshaman might pretend to work some doubtful magic.

There was a time when critics were easily able to list the top 10 exhibits in the Summer Exhibition, even the top 20, but that is now impossible.

We can offer instead only the spreading bottom of the heap: the shoddy souvenir-shop stuff of the first room; the casts of the lower bowel in pale porno-pink ceramic by Tamu Gollmer; the gauche, ugly, crude portrait prints by Kitaj; the crass self-hackeries by Bellany (one of them tagged at £100,000); the slack and dull "performances" by Gillian Ayres; slacker and duller by Sandra Blow; and worse still by John Hoyland; the silly conceits of the empty-headed Tom Phillips; the pets' corner of the print room - and on and on into an ever deepening tedium that compels us to ask how any of the diminishing number of capable old faithfuls (and a few new, like Antony Williams) can bear to exhibit their sincere, modest, unassuming and honest work in such dishonest company.

Among these keepers of the Academic faith, lost amid the architectural models, and in spite of its ghastly frame, a watercolour by Carey Clarke of an Interior at Farnleigh deserves some sort of prize. And for the £25,000 painting prize - to be awarded in a month or so - Ken Howard's Self-Portrait in Venice, though not even shortlisted, is surely the only candidate.

I know that in the past, frequently indeed, I have damned Howard as too given to unthinking formula, but in this portrait all the old vigour and spirit that made him famous have returned.

The exhibition ends with a room devoted to Anthony Green's Resurrection, A Pictorial Sculpture for the Millennium - tagged at £250,000. Humorous, self-deprecating, and in the idiom of the pop-up illustration to a fairy tale, this monstrous assembly is charming, old-fashioned, early Disney stuff, whimsical and disproportionate, given to afterthoughts and sudden fancies, the gentle art of the tranquilly insane.

In the cynical, advantage-seeking, publicity-conscious, moneymaking, stony-hearted and dissembling Royal Academy, it seems a trifle out of place.

The Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, Piccadilly, W1. Opens on Monday, until 10 August. Daily 10am-6pm (Fridays 10am-10pm). Admission £7.

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