Why do they do it? Walking around the Royal Academy’s summer show – “the world’s largest open submission exhibition”, an immense gathering of good, bad and (mostly) mediocre art by amateurs and professionals, the famous and forgettable – you have to wonder, what is that urge to put pencil to paper or, in the case of Ryan Gander, carefully construct a furry simulacrum of a slumbering cat?
There are paintings here of lemons and toilets, abstract canvases of lines, or nothing at all, a huge hanging blue textile, a jerking robot and, inevitably, a statue of a stripper by Allen Jones: he’s incorrigible, at 85. There seems to be more art than ever – 1,613 pieces to be precise – and unlike recent years, there’s no theme as such, except it’s all apparently inspired by writer EM Forster’s injunction to “only connect”. If the curators really can connect a painting of a Venetian palazzo by 94-year-old Joe Tilson with Michael Robey’s pornographic pastiche of a Greek vase and Carlos Zapata’s lifesized sculpture of a preserved corpse, Bog Man, hats off to them.
