Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2009

You sir! Pass my monacle.

To assert that the Royal Academy’s long standing tradition of open submission to its Summer Exhibition is a form of democracy, as the great and good would have us believe in the meeja this week, is to adopt an essentially self-contradictory position. There’s a paradox in operation.

I say so because the actual tradition of the Academy is one of conservatism, elitism, royal and aristocratic patronage, closed shops, and negative discrimination at every possible level. It has played its part in helping to build the reputation of English art as the poor man of Europe, dragging its pallid shape along in the wake of the adventurous and spunky Europeans (and Americans in the precociously recent 20th Century). Picasso, Miro, Pollock, Richter? What, when we have the St Ives school?

At this year’s exhibition, as in the past, the jury’s chosen water colourists and acrylicists rub shoulders with established artists. What’s different is that this time around, apparently it’s funky. Flirting dangerously with the 21st Century, the Academy has drafted in Emin and Hirst, like Royalty at a cup final. Britain has globally recognised stars of the art world, and here they are. We only sing when we’re winning.

This is a good mix. It is an excellent chance to compare the output of the great engine room of English artistic output, the reality of what art is for most artists (i.e. rendering approximations of observed phenomena with paint, charcoal etc), with the work of the great conceptualists of our time. Who will come off best? What will connect, emotionally or intellectually? And what will have lasting quality?

We find ourselves at a fascinating juncture in art history, entangled as never before in the reality of the market place. It’s an entertaining scramble for the Art Quid, but let’s not pretend that democracy has anything to do with it.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2009 continues until 16th August.

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