Earth’s plight is desperate but that doesn’t mean artists necessarily have anything to say about it. Some do, and have been making powerful environmental art for years. Richard Long has a piece here, the latest in a lifetime of walking through landscapes making ephemeral markers of sticks and stones, inviting you to commune like him with the fields and hills. But imposing “climate” as a theme turns out to be a goad to all that is worst in the Royal Academy. This is a catastrophic exhibition but not in the way it intends.
The insincerity hits you like a stench of decaying rubbish. I’m not saying veteran Royal Academician Allen Jones doesn’t care about the climate but his painting sure looks like a piss-take. A man and woman run towards a flaming sky, painted in his deliberately lurid pop style. Her breasts are green. Below this persiflage hangs Atomic Landscape # Prepfordeath by Zachary Walsh. It’s a big rolling green British landscape with a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
