More means worse

The Royal Academy Summer Show boasts that it is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition, but this year it focuses on invited artists and distinguished foreign visitors. Thus it neglects both the Academicians, its real strength and raison d’être, and the until now faithful corps of British artists who submit year in, year out. As more and more non-RAs are rejected — or, possibly worse, are accepted but not hung — and while many of the RAs themselves are sidelined and crowded together, the nature of this exhibition is changing for the worse. It needs to be said from time to time that the Academy would not exist without its RAs. It’s not a publicly funded institution like the Tate or National Gallery; it is essentially an exhibiting society of artists. Sometimes it seems as if the Academy is embarrassed by its greatest resource and the very thing that gives it its singular identity.

The show starts badly: the visitor is greeted by monsters. Jake and Dinos Chapman, invited non-RAs, have knocked up some sheet-steel dinosaurs with cutting edges, joking that they might have been made ‘by Richard Serra’s delinquent son’. Inside the building, Gallery I features contributions from Tàpies, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. There’s also one of Andreas Gursky’s remarkable photographs of Bahrain, a Kitaj self-portrait and a stripped drum kit by Richard Wilson, all skins gone. (Sounds like a comment on the whole exhibition.) Two small, beautiful paintings by Mick Moon have the kind of intrigue and resonance one wants from this show but rarely finds. Hasten into Gallery II for a tribute to the late Sandra Blow. Her thrilling colour and exact sense of placement — her brilliant orchestration of abstract pictorial elements — are evident here, even in these apparently quieter works. She is much missed.