The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition offers up the good, the bad and the ugly – and a sore neck

One of the great traditions of the RA’s Summer Exhibition has always been that each work submitted was seen in person by the Hanging Committee, passed in front of their keen or bemused gaze by a succession of porters. Of course this method had its drawbacks: judges could miss something in a state of postprandial somnolence induced by the consumption of too much (heavily fortified) beef tea, but at least the paintings, drawings and prints had a chance of being chosen through that all-important direct communication of eye and art. (Sculpture, because of its scale and mass, has always presented its own logistical problems.) This year, for the first time, artists submitted their works digitally for the initial round of judging. Has this made any appreciable difference? Not really. There’s the same mix of inspired and dull work, with perhaps more fashionable nonsense than before (current orthodoxies infiltrating via the digital system?), but there’s no great change to be noted.