Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy, until 16 August
Every year the Summer Exhibition arrives with promises of innovation and difference, every year it’s much the same. People gamely ask ‘what’s it like this year?’, and the imaginative struggle for a novel way to describe it. Yet its great strength is its unchangeability — the extraordinary (occasionally preposterous) juxtaposition of the international avant-garde, establishment figures and amateurs from the Home Counties and beyond. Nowhere else can such diversity and potential richness be found. The Academy continues to try to tame this leviathan, to modify its rules, or to dedicate a whole gallery to some lately trendy off-shoot of art such as film and video. Photography is already well-established in Burlington House; now the moving image is rather belatedly making a bid for recognition. Man the barricades! The Summer Exhibition must be defended from such ephemeral fashions.
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