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.
If you squint, you might conceivably be able to make it out amid all the familiar faces: the Pollyannish platitudes of Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill – hello again to him); Richard Long’s distillation of a trek through the Cairngorms into concrete poetry; the clinical pop-obviousness of Michael Craig-Martin (he’s another unwritten rule of the Summer Exhibition).
Let’s get this out of the way: in a show of 1,613 works, there’s always going to be plenty to admire. Up close, Frank Bowling’s Where sheep may safely graze is a cauldron of gluey detritus and bubbling day-glo pigments. A few steps back, and it’s all sublime: the sun melting into a woodland glade.