This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is best enjoyed as a mirror of the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Conservative government. It is a gasping death-rattle of mediocrity, a miserable garden party of vapid good taste. There are no laughs and precious few glimpses of good art. Nothing points to the future. All you will learn from it is that the small “c” conservatism of British middle-class culture has reached the end of its rope.
“Art Is in All of Us”, affirms a typically profound placard by Bob and Roberta Smith RA. If only. That radical-sounding statement might seem to promise a show that’s a wild, democratic, free-for-all romp. After all there are more than 1,700 works of art here, apparently chosen pretty much by flipping a coin. But it is almost all the same, all tepid, polite and pointless. In the same room as Smith’s platitude is a sculpture of two model ships with the leaden one-note wordplay title Worship-Warship and a pair of ugly, kitsch ceramic deer. For a moment I thought these were examples of outsider art. Bless. They are actually by Richard Wilson RA and Cathie Pilkington RA. Either these eminent artists have totally run out of ideas or they have submitted any old random items lying around their studios.
