Art, Photography and Perfect Snobbing

Heels clack on the parquet floors of the Royal Academy as we enter the 245th Summer Exhibition.

One is greeted by a vomit of paintings on whitewashed walls, pictures of every imaginable ilk: big paintings and little paintings, paintings of people and of scenery, of furniture and of trees, of accurately drawn scrunched up paper and of neon expressionist works bordering on offensive.

So this is real art; the Royal Academy says so. Broader questions come to mind like, what is art? How should we see the world through the murmur of polite erudite conversation, as people try to outdo each other in their lists of cultural references?

Amidst eavesdropping on the conversations of more intelligent visitors, as one so often does at galleries, I hear someone say, “It’s almost too much” and I find myself agreeing. It sort of looks like how I’d like my living room to look – with a show stopper of a feature wall – but the curation of the exhibition makes it difficult to write a review. The best metaphor I could come up with was that it felt like scrolling though a feed on a Tumblr page; it was a relentless surge of one thing after the other: overpowering, yet addictive. With over 1,200 works on display, it was difficult for one to stand out from the never-ending bombardment of creativity.

This exhibition is supposed to be a measure of the current cultural epoch; an exhibition of the zeitgeist, except it’s not really. Where are the protest paintings, the calls to arms, or hanging effigies of George Osborne? But, lest we forget, this is the establishment.

This is a place where the quality of art is measured in the little red dots it can accrue (signs of a bidding war) and the pounds you need to hand over in exchange for ownership; brilliantly portrayed in Cornelia Parker (RA)’s work Stolen Thunder; a print of a blank piece of paper plastered with red dots. So meta.

The hierarchical snobbery is as palpable as the overpriced, tacky gifts. The list of works shows a predominance of names ending with the coveted “RA” symbol (helpfully capitalised to help us pick out the ‘real’ artists). Here are some of the things I saw, making my way through the many rooms: several sweet Tracey Emin (RA) doodles, with an homage of red dots trailing in their wake; an extortionately priced Marina Ambramovic (RA); and a James Butler (RA) piece too. The RA like to look after their own, you come to notice. This is surprising, given the show’s supposedly open access principle in which anyone who believes themselves’ talented can pay a fee to have their work judged and, if deemed ‘artistic’ enough, put on sale at the exhibition.

The crowning glory of the show, Grayson Perry (RA)’s The Vanity of Small Differences, is triumphantly hung in a room all of its own. The series of tapestries seems to summarise the modern class system in a gleaming tribute to Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, in a way that is both brilliantly scathing and beautifully colourful. One from the middle-class diptych, The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, is a disturbingly accurate depiction of a life depressingly similar to my own: Apple products lie in tableaux, the £2.10 Guardian splayed on the table alongside some organic vegetables, the Cath Kidston bag, tasteful vintage vases, etc. Your esteemed Arts Editor and I spent a good five minutes picking out things of relevance to our blasé, middle-class lives. Perry has managed to condense the story of our time onto fabric and what stands out is the great many brand names, showing a pathetic vanity towards the objects we define ourselves through.

Further on, we found a room given over entirely to photography, somewhat controversial for a ‘fine art’ exhibition. Emily Allchurch’s surreal panorama of images stitched together through the magic of Photoshop stood out in its backlit vibrancy; no doubt the inspiration for many a GCSE Photography project to come.

I enjoyed Tim Lewis’s Mule Make Mule – a mechanical kangaroo-type automaton thing, which draws itself on a piece of paper as you crank a wheel. I watched a German woman squeal with delight as she turned the wheel and it continued outlining itself. It’s that kind of interactive nature found in art, which really makes it great. It was just fun. Academicians too often forget about fun.

There is no cohesion to the curation, but I like that; it’s eccentric and erratic – I could have done without the nauseatingly yellow room of architecture though (should architectural plans be allowed a place next to ‘real’ art?). And Gallery II, full of the ‘cheap’ art, was dizzyingly claustrophobic. Humphrey Ocean, curator of the Large and Small Weston rooms said, “It’s the sort of show that could only be curated by artists,” which perfectly epitomises the snobbery of the place. In the way that the phrase “perfectly epitomises” can only hope to emphasise.

It is not entirely inaccessible to everyone (providing you are of the appropriate height and have good enough eyesight to see the paintings high up on the walls); anyone can go, simply to revel in the pleasure of the pictures and not worry about what any of it means. However, I wouldn’t recommend going if you believe you can paint. Although they’ve managed to keep the moments of “pfft, I /a child/ my Nan could’ve done that” to a minimum. One feels humbled in the face of others far more talented that you.

There was little originality in the exhibition, albeit in the place where the avant-garde was inaugurated (the pre-Raphaelites bro), this Summer Exhibition showed minimal innovation. Nothing shocks.  There is nothing new under the sun, nor within the walls of the RA it seems. If anything, the exhibition reminds us of the simple human pleasure in the creation of something that didn’t exist in the world before you. Even if the RA is a bit snobby about it.

The Summer Exhibition is open until 18 August 2013. See the Royal Academy of Arts Website for more details.