To survive the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, don’t linger — just scan and pounce

The Royal Academy’s biggest annual prize is the Charles Wollaston Award, worth £25,000, for the most distinguished work in the Summer Exhibition, this year won by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui (born 1944). Although his preferred media are clay and wood, El Anatsui has taken to making installations from found materials woven together like cloth, and has done rather well with them around the world. He was invited to make a hanging for the façade of Burlington House for the duration of the Summer Exhibition, and this junk curtain (composed inter alia of aluminium bottle tops, printing plates, copper wire and roofing sheets) now obscures or ornaments — depending on your taste — the Academy’s noble brow. Confronted with this gaudy and meretricious bauble, the prospective visitor may well turn away in despondency, but I doubt it. Curiosity is more likely to take the spectator within.

What can you expect to see? A rather uneasy mixture of Old Guard RAs interspersed with a selection of current stylistic orthodoxies.