Mick Hartley

There's more to art than the Chapman brothers, thank God. My main destination yesterday was the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – and very enjoyable it was too. A picture you don't like? Move on to the next one: there's plenty to look at.

Not that everyone's a fan, mind. Here's Waldemar Januszczak (again):

As my editor will confirm, I will usually do everything I can to avoid writing about the Royal Academy’s summer show. Not just because it is such a tawdry event, full of such average art, or because the displays are so crowded and higgledy-piggledy that you cannot actually see if the art is better than average, or because most of the country’s best artists (Lucian Freud springs to mind, and Damien Hirst) are not academicians. Those are all factors, but the chief reason I avoid it is that I always end up saying the same things about it. It’s always lousy. It doesn’t change.

All of it? Always lousy? If he really believes that, then perhaps he's got no business being an art critic. But he's a man with an axe to grind, and it's not unrelated to his recent eulogies over the Chapmans and their Hell - "the key contemporary artwork of our times":

The greatest weakness of the summer show is not its bad art, but its irrelevance. For reasons that are too complicated and historical to go into here, the event ceased long ago to matter a fig. Its mood is plucked from an early Miss Marple story. Its artists are the nation’s also-rans. Its pertinence vies with that of a boater. White, middle-class, middlebrow and allergic to progress, the summer show caters only for the out of touch. But you know all that. We’ve been saying it for years. So why might this year’s event be different?

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Chiefly because Tracey Emin has been given a room to herself, in which she displays a selection of works by her friends and her. Say what you like about Emin, but she walks the walk. The qualities she brings to British art – lippiness, sexiness, fractured femininity, spiritual turmoil, hard-core experience of the other side of the tracks, total fearlessness, beautiful thinking, beautiful dreaming, a refusal to shut up, a refusal to go “normal” on us, an unshakable faith in art, a ton of experience with progressive techniques allied to a blossoming talent as a painter – are qualities the RA needs as desperately as a desert needs water….

Emin, meanwhile, is constitutionally incapable of middle-browness. She just can’t do it. So, the deliciously outrageous display she has inflicted on the summer show is chiefly about nudity and sex. There’s even a sign outside warning visitors that some of the exhibits “may cause offence”. The “may” is optimistic. Miss Marple will run a mile at the sight of Mat Collishaw’s wonky pseudo-Victorian automaton, featuring a life-sized zebra having sex with a woman in what the title assures us is “the old-fashioned way”. Or the gory collages of that crazy Austrian proto-Emin Elke Krystufek, who pictures a menstruating mother inserting her fingers into herself and showing us the blood. The Israeli artist Sigalit Landau gives us a powerful video of a naked woman doing a Hula Hoop routine with a ring of barbed wire on a seashore. There’s a big gold painting by Gary Hume of a fuzzily gendered figure in underpants. And a lovely work by Emin, full of gentle pink hesitations, which finally reveals itself to be a reclining nude opening her legs.

Well….

There's no point in getting worked up about it: Tracey, and Waldemar, would like nothing better than for outrage to be provoked and strongly worded protests from Tunbridge Wells to be forthcoming. My feelings, for what they're worth, are that it's a shame that the show, which quite a few visitors had brought their children to (see photo), should have a gallery which they're forbidden from entering (it's over 18s only). Also, the general tone adopted by all the other gallery curators is of a light touch, and self-deprecation: they aim to present the works as well as possible without intruding. Tracey, of course, is incapable of a light touch: this is her gallery, full of pictures by her mates, and you never forget it. Also, nearly all the works are not for sale – elsewhere in the show there are very few NFS – which makes you wonder what the point is, beyond the publicity.

The main reason for the under 18s ban, I imagine, is "Pink Narcissus (Version 1)", a melange of penises and hands arranged so that the shadow it casts from a projector is of two facial profiles. Clever! It's the kind of thing you can imagine the artists being enormously pleased with, and was no doubt irresistible to Tracey. Then there's a pubic triangle of hair titled "Hair of the First Girl I Ever Slept With", by Michael Fullerton. Ring any bells? You might say that it's an Eminesque piece of work. A homage, if you like: School of Emin. There's also a very powerful and strange photograph of a grinning young Damien Hirst, holding the head of a dissected corpse which I'm sure I've seen somewhere before. Tracey remarks something to the effect that it was the moment when his career was decided, and indeed you can almost see the dollar signs in his eyes as he realises how powerful dead bodies can be. 

As I say though, no point in getting steamed up about it. I thought her gallery was the least enjoyable in the show, because it grates, because it shouts and swears where the other galleries are engaged in a polite conversation. Still. it's inevitably going to be the main talking point – I've just done it myself – and that's what it's all about. It's a shame though, but no surprise, that an critic like Waldemar Januszczak should be so easily impressed by bombast and self-serving publicity, justified by an appeal to that old chestnut "relevance" (why sculptures of pink penises should be more relevant than anything else on show isn't clear), at the expense of the solid qualities of so much of the rest of the art on display.