Mick Hartley

Having only just visited, here’s a late – very late – recommendation for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, now in its last week.

There’s a kind of exhilaration to the show, which is so different to the normal exhibition experience. The pictures are hung sometimes up to four or five deep, maybe over a hundred in a gallery. No need – indeed no time – to study every work: you just head to what catches your eye. There’s just a number against each picture, which you look up – if you’re interested – in your catalogue. So there’s none of that peering at the label to the side of each picture to try and work out what it is you’re looking at. All this means somehow that although it’s crowded, people aren’t getting in your way as they usually do at these places. The atmosphere’s relaxed and friendly. At the entrance to each room there are some notes, but they’re oddly matey, very different to the usual didactic tone you get at, say, Tate Modern. It’ll just be about who arranged the hangings, and what you might want to look out for, but with the conceit that you’re as familiar with the artists as the author – “Fred Smith’s two paintings find him in an unusually whimsical mood, while Bernice Bloggs seems to have abandoned her abstract approach of last year in favour of a more representational stance…” That kind of thing.

I wonder how much of this is due to the different purpose of the show. Here, after all, most of the pictures are for sale. It’s in the interests of the artists and of the curators of the exhibition to make the show as exciting and alluring as possible. As you head into each new gallery there’s a surge of energy – yes, this looks good, now – what shall we concentrate on here? It’s not so much that the usual art exhibition isn’t interested in drawing you in, more that the terms of the contract are different. Normally you’re going to see the work of an established artist. They don’t have to prove anything to you. Nor does the gallery have to prove anything to you. It’s up to you to get what pleasure you can from what’s on offer, and if you don’t, well, hey, it’s your loss. You didn’t enjoy the show? Well clearly you’ve fallen short of the level of aesthetic awareness necessary to be able to appreciate the artist’s unique vision, and your only choice is to admit that fact to yourself and slink off feeling just that little bit smaller. (Though it’s more likely you convince yourself that, yes, it really was a super show, wasn’t it darling?) All this is encouraged by the tone of the commentary – joylessly didactic – and the ambience of the gallery – hushed reverence.

In a commercial setting though, you the observer are the boss. The show’s in your honour. Yes, come on in, look around – hope you like it.

I wouldn’t want to make too much of this. I don’t frequent the commercial galleries round the West End enough to make general judgements. Maybe this RA show was a particularly good one. Maybe I’ve been to too many dreary exhibitions recently at mainstream galleries. I just happened to enjoy this show; the feeling that the painters were just, you know, people who paint or sculpt for a living, who are exhibiting their work as a necessary part of their livelihood, displaying their wares before an audience; people who have, in the back of the catalogue, real addresses in the real world. Not people setting themselves up as arbiters of taste, special people, different from the rest of us, visionaries, transgressing boundaries, who see it as their duty to subvert our sad middle-class illusions, to shed some light into our dull little lives.

Interestingly the one lapse, the one place where that old art-speak verbiage showed through, was in gallery VI, devoted to architects. Clearly these big names aren’t expecting commissions to flow in from a show like this. They can afford a tone of lofty condescension. The show’s theme was light (though why it had to have a theme at all was never clear to me) so there were quotes painted in large letters round the wall. This, for instance, from David Chipperfield: “Light is the most beautiful of materials, it connects us to the natural world and, as this world becomes more artificial, its purity becomes even more powerful.” Or this, from Nicholas Grimshaw: “The existence of light allows us to walk along the tightrope between translucency and transparency.” Perhaps this says something about architects and their reputations (plus the fact that Nicholas Grimshaw is currently president of the Royal Academy): the fact that no one took it upon themselves, on hearing these leaden pronouncements, to slap their silly faces and tell them to get over themselves.