The RA's Summer Exhibition: Britain's most ridiculed show is back with a vengeance
In the clammy heights of June, London's art critics curl their toes in anticipation of an invitation to review the Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition. Over the past decade it has been written about as the object of ridicule, scorn, and pity, and has been used, intermittently, as a vessel for questionable political mission creep. While this year's show, which has been curated by Farshid Moussavi, is worthy of the Summer Exhibition's mission to celebrate the individual's right to an aesthetic sensibility, it is still as frenzied as ever. I think it's safe to say that the 257th edition hasn't unearthed the next big star of the British art market.
The core of the Exhibition since 1769 has been and continues to be an offering of works by members of the Royal Academy, their protégés, and artistically inclined members of the public, most of which are up for sale. This set-up demands very little from the viewer beyond casual immersion into the 1,729 works on show and a sense of humour as one's guide through the bizarre backwaters of the contemporary art complex.
This year huge, inflated black balls with banal questions pasted on them in white font lie strewn across the Annenberg Courtyard, as if a very large child had just cast them out of a Burlington House window. 'What do animals dream of?', 'Does abstraction have rules?', 'Will time tell?'; these are some of the questions British artist Ryan Gander's balls pose to the unsuspecting public. The only question I could ask myself is, if I managed to unchain one of these giant balls and roll it in front of a bus on Piccadilly, how loud a POP would it make?
The usual artistic smorgasbord awaits entrants to the main galleries: Tamara Kostianovsky's suspended carcasses embroidered out of fabrics fit for Little House on the Prairie, Tony Brook's ultra-depressing still life of AirPods, Juergen Teller's raunchy shot of former porn star Mia Khalifa hiding her face behind a nondescript mounted mammal and Lena Krenokova's vase which resembles a mass of molten breasts with multi-coloured nipples.
There are also some unexpected guests at this feast, namely 101 gold-lined taxidermied rats, perched up on their hind legs and arranged in concentric circles on a platform in the final room of the exhibition. I (the name of this installation) by the collaborative duo Zatorski + Zatorksi is supposedly meant to prompt the viewer to ask themselves whether, in an age of artificial intelligence, we have become the experiment. But again I found myself battling with a different question: if I were to spend £85,000 on fur and bullion, would it be in the form of 101 rat pelts lined with 24-carat gold?
At last, acknowledgement must be given to the Academicians and their annual offerings onto the sacrificial pyre: Marlene Dumas, who set the new record for a living female artist last month when her painting Miss January (1997) sold at Christie's for $13.6 million, contributed her print and ink drawing Let's Talk to the Dead; Tracey Emin made a double donation, her interpretation of The Crucifixion (2025) the more impressive of the two; and Grayson Perry coughed up his usual votive urn.
Although Emin's Crucifixion is strikingly harrowing and could even be, dare I say, quite good, seeing some of these masters in the wilderness of the contemporary art collective, looking sheepishly unremarkable, makes you wonder who, deeming them to be worthier (literally) objects of artistic expression than their amateur counterparts, has elevated them to the illustrious white cubes of the elitist contemporary art scene.
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