The RA Summer Exhibition is back – with the usual no-hopers and dearth of ideas
What do you get when you combine a bust of the late Queen made of thumb tacks, a balloon dog wrapped in Tunnocks Teacake foil, and a toy-bright painting by the reliably silly Joe Lycett, titled I drink a crisp, cold beer in a pool in Los Angeles while Gary Lineker looks on in disgust (yours for £1,354,999 – or rather the price of Lineker’s BBC gig)?
The answer, I’m sorry to report, is the return of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. It’s the usual open-to-all variation on the familiar: art world big dogs and amateur no-hopers. It’s like you never left.
There’s an unwritten rule that each edition needs a vaguely portentous themelet, emptied of enough meaning that it could apply to pretty much all art anywhere. Guess what? Exhibition coordinator David Remfry delivers with “Only Connect”, the gnomic epigraph to EM Forster’s novel Howards End, which the academician transposes into a call for human empathy.