The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

I had one, whole day to myself between all the kids leaving and me going back to make sure the parental units were still the right way up (they still are. Hooray). I decided to spend it finally going to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It was my third attempt and it did indeed prove to be the charm.

I try to go most years, but this year I particularly wanted to visit because my amazingly talented friend, Kaz got a picture accepted and I needed to go and see it in actual, real life. It’s the picture at the head of this post. As you can see from all those lovely, luscious red dots, it has sold out its entire print run. I could not be more pleased and proud for her and it was a great joy to see it. You can see all her work on her website, here.

The Guardian gave this year’s exhibition a drubbing in their miserly, joyless review of it, so I was curious to see it for myself. I had an absolutely brutal headache the entire day, which took the shine off things rather, but I’d much rather do something lovely and deal with pain than scrub floors or fill in tax returns while my brain tries to climb out through my ears. Art is always good for what ails ya, but I’m glad there wasn’t much loud art included. As the exhibition is in its final few weeks, there weren’t whole crowds of noisy people there either. Although as I was looking at this fella and thinking what fun he must have been to make, a woman bustled up with her friend and shrieked: ‘Ah! Here’s where the nightmares start!’

I also saw one woman brushing her teeth in the courtyard as I went in. Clearly the final weeks are for the stranger elements of the art viewing public, of which I proudly count myself one.

The way I read the Guardian review was that there was not enough challenging, modern, fierce art and too much art that involved nice pictures of peoples’ pets and gardens and things that ordinary people might want to hang on their walls. I’d say that was true but also that it wasn’t a problem for either me personally or the Summer Exhibition as a whole. It is not like other exhibitions. It is not meant to be. It is, frankly, always a bit of a crap shoot. It depends on who submits work, what the theme is, who the main curator is and which academicians are asked to curate rooms. Every year is a bit of a curate’s egg and this year was no exception.

It was less fierce and challenging. The second year I went, I walked round a raised podium of charred human bones while a woman who mistook me for a gallerist asked me if I was interested in buying it. I replied: ‘My cats would play havoc with that arrangement,’ and we silently agreed to never speak to each other again. Apart from the woman and her nightmare sculpture, which looked more to me like it was an audition piece for the new Monsters Inc movie, there was none of that this year. I do enjoy a bit of weird art, so I was a little sad that there weren’t more things for me to tilt my head at and wonder if I was looking at it the right way round.

A couple of years ago there was a great deal of focus on drawings, which I really enjoyed. This year seemed to be the year of the painting, which would certainly track the current market trends. According to a very fierce art salesman I met at a commercial gallery in Fitzrovia on my summer school course, painting is very now and also very then but quite probably also the future. It’s all to do with Covid, apparently. He was trying to sell enormous canvases that I think of as very much the ‘Will that go with my sofa?’ school of painting. As my sofa was bought in the IKEA sale for the sole reason that it fit neatly through the boat’s living room window, buying art to match it is not really a problem I have, although I obviously sympathise with all who suffer in this way.

There was not as much art that I loved deeply this year. This is probably a very good thing due to the boat situation and definitely a very good thing for the fiscal responsibility situation. What I did fall in love with tended to be either not for sale or way, way out of my budget. I adored Anselm Kiefer’s enormous, Hortus Conclusus.

I will never not love an Emin and there were a few. This was my favourite.

And I really enjoyed this photo, because I think it was taken just down the road from where I live. There is a row of Victorian terraces with the great, glass expanse of Canary Wharf behind them and I’ve always thought it would make a great photograph.

It’s called Urban Beings V and it’s by Francesco Russo.

Two other pieces I loved were Ben Johnson’s Berlin Pool, which was a painting that looked like a photograph

and a digital light box that looked like the windows of a block of flats at night, with each window showing the inhabitants moving around that was called Creep East by Tessa Garland. This was impossible to photograph but you can see a film by her, here.

After I’d looked at 1700 artworks, some with greater attention than others, I was very hot, very tired and rather oppressed by my headache. I took myself and my headache to Plum Valley in Chinatown for dim sum. I propped my book up against a teapot full of Jasmine tea and forked fried turnip in XO sauce and prawn dumplings into my face until I felt like a normal human being again. Apart from asking for more tea and some steamed custard buns I didn’t speak to another living soul for two hours and it was even more enjoyable than spending the morning in an art gallery.

Lucky me. I got to do both.