First published in The Jackdaw ♯50, July/August 2005 The RA should come clean about its intentions. It was instituted to help artists not cheat them. Whereas once the Summer Exhibition was a bazaar for the otherwise disfranchised it is now being recreated as a curated exhibition with the usual sly interference from State Art. One… Continue reading RA summer exhibition: losing transparency
RA summer exhibition: not all open exhibitions are cheats
In The Jackdaw ♯8 artist Doug Lowe asked if the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was a genuine open or an Academicians’ closed shop. Has anyone ever worked out the total cost to artists of a big show like the RA Summer Exhibition in time, depreciation of vehicles, fuel, parking, framing, mounting, entrance etc.? It must… Continue reading RA summer exhibition: not all open exhibitions are cheats
RA summer exhibition: plus ca change
PLUS CA CHANGE: In The Jackdaw ♯10, over ten years ago, anonymous artist ‘Trimmer’ responded to the inclusion of guests of the young British artists who are now, coincidentally, themselves nearly all Royal Academicians: Effectively, a whole generation of painters has been erased from the art scene, precisely because they hold some principles and adhere… Continue reading RA summer exhibition: plus ca change
Can the RA summer exhibition still be considered an open submission show?
… Painter Patrick Cullen supplies damning evidence that the answer is ‘No!’ A detailed survey of 2011’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition reveals that the non-members’ work now represents only 29% of the total exhibition if measured by the amount of wall space it commands. This is in contrast to a figure of 78% estimated for… Continue reading Can the RA summer exhibition still be considered an open submission show?
Culture Select Committee of the House of Commons: evidence
Having already given evidence to the Culture Select Committee of the House of Commons, the editor of The Jackdaw was asked to justify some of his criticisms in writing. What follows is his further submission to the Committee… We were discussing, I recall, the Arts Council Collection, a repository of some 7,546 works (plus 67… Continue reading Culture Select Committee of the House of Commons: evidence
Mickey Mouse museums
The word ‘Disneyfication’ is usually pejorative, implying noise, trashiness and escapist superficiality. Not any more. It was only a matter of time before ‘difficult’ history and learning were sweetened to something more palatable and instantly gratifying. Serious cultural commentators are now using this word to describe a useful policy designed to increase the appeal of… Continue reading Mickey Mouse museums
The RA is not a charity
Inspired by landscape painter Patrick Cullen, The Jackdaw Sept-Oct 2011 reprinted pieces about the Royal Academy that have appeared in The Jackdaw over the last eleven years. All deal with the genuine fears of artists that the Summer Exhibition is progressively a closed shop whilst being marketed as an ‘Open’. Patrick’s research succinctly reinforces previous… Continue reading The RA is not a charity
Gruel for the masses
The State should be more circumspect than to behave like a private collector. Unfortunately, collecting and exhibiting in national collections according to narrow personal tastes and loyalties is established practice. Those employed to run Contemporary Art are selected because they have been carefully programmed in the tenets of State Art and if they have doubts… Continue reading Gruel for the masses
Tate Trustees and the public interest
The Tate recently named two new trustees, one of whom is painter Tomma Abts. She is a 44-year-old German, recently appointed Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, who won the Turner Prize in 2006. As an artist trustee, she replaced Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004. Abts’s paintings are all… Continue reading Tate Trustees and the public interest
You read it here first
In due course, when it has become accepted as a truism, I expect Lee’s First Paradigm – as I’ve modestly decided to name my new theory – to gather a Nobel Prize. LFP concerns museum attendance, and it goes like this: “The proportion of any indigenous population sufficiently stimulated by a love of art and… Continue reading You read it here first