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'State Art' is swallowing The Royal Academy Seemingly unstoppable, the apparently incurable bacterium of State Art continues to spread like a plague into every corner of culture. Like the feared superbug, necrotising fasciitis, which feasts on healthy flesh and for which amputation or extreme excision are the only known expedients for stalling its progress, it’s touch means certain death to the host. The Royal Academy is State Art’s latest victim. I predict that within ten years the policy and membership of the Royal Academy will be indistinguishable from those in State Art-sponsored galleries and organisations with their concentration on skilless novelty and the slavish worship of new media, neither of which, despite official lies to the contrary, has any audience. Meanwhile, those still engaging with figurative painting and sculpture, who might reasonably have expected to find succour if not guidance and tuition from the Academy, will be abandoned to eat their cake. What started as a localised token infection with the election to the Academy of hubristic blatherers like Antony Gormley has now become full-blown. In this year’s Summer Exhibition an entire room was handed to a new Academician, Gary Hume, a painter incidentally of no discernible ability and whose reputation has to be taken entirely on the say-so of State Art’s apologists, in order for him to invite his mates to show. None of his invitees needed the exposure and all did him proud by submitting a collection of meaningless toys and fads, the like of which are already visible in every Shoreditch stunt emporium. This was likely to impress gullible critics who annually express their frustration at the Summer Exhibition, but audiences and artists lost out. By allocating rooms to Allen Jones’s hideous sculptures as well as to Hume’s already over-exposed chums, space was denied those artists who pay £18 apiece to have their work considered for inclusion and many of whom not only need the conspicuous exposure because they don’t receive it elsewhere, but rely on the small income generated by contacts forged and sales made at the Summer Exhibition. Given its tyrannical record of intolerance and control freakery, many have wondered how long it would take the State Art Academy, as represented by the Tate, the Arts Council and their willing vexillations of volunteer drumbangers, to see off a competing Academy with its ostensibly conflicting ideals. The answer is: ‘Not long’. As old RAs die off replacements are elected not from among those who are figurative artists and are, for better or worse, continuing the traditions of the Royal Academy, but from among Turner Prize nominees who already have access to the galleries and international savoir faire of the State Art circus. Almost as if it is ashamed of its own history, the Academy is terrified of being perceived and derided by detractors as old-fashioned and traditional. It won’t even give memorial exhibitions to deceased members, or to those it trained in its schools, for fear of being accused of conservatism. Neither will it vouchsafe exhibitions to existing members whose more conventional works might give the wrong impression. The Royal Academy has decided that it must be seen to keep up with the Southwark nouveaux. As I’ve stated in these pages before, the tragedy in this is that the Academy, both through education and exhibition, is ideally equipped to nourish those wide areas of contemporary work currently ignored by State Art. Take education: the number of fine art degree courses in Britain has increased from 54 in 1990 to 114 now and to the best of my knowledge in not one of them might a student desiring such a structured and comprehensive course of study learn the science and techniques of figurative art. Most of these 114 courses might be closed down at no loss, because students learn little of practical use. How can they when there is no teaching? One Midlands university has at this moment 250 fine art students for which are provided one full-time and three part-time staff. Is it not incredible that so many young people are prepared to saddle themselves with serious debt in order to qualify for a worthless qualification? The Royal Academy has a school bespoke to provide such a training, but it isn’t doing it because it has chosen the easy option of chasing fashion. The Academy should be embracing the figurative artists of ability, promise and existing reputation, instead of broadcasting to this its natural constituency the signals of cowardly surrender. In the last few weeks the fifth column of Serotistas within the Academy elected Fiona Rae, a former Turner Prize nominee whose imagination and engagement with the world are so undeveloped that they extend no further than illustrating the mannerisms of brushmarks themselves. Such art about art was originally an engaging (if shallow) strategy. It has now developed into an epidemic neurosis. All students exhibiting such tendencies towards retreat from the real world should be referred to a therapist. This year’s Summer Exhibition was praised by critics for its sparser, tidier hang and the increase in average quality caused by inviting artists who are not members and who wouldn’t dream of submitting to the indignity of an ‘open’ selection which might reject them, and which is, anyway, a procedure widely known to be corrupted by nods, winks and backscratches. The Academy should ignore critics who lampoon the formerly bazaar-like appearance of the annual show, for they perennially miss the point. They criticise it, often justifiably, for the abysmal standard – crummy work which, incidentally, just happens to sell like hot cakes to people who don’t read art criticism – and the weary repetitiveness of the Academicans’ own submissions. Critics frequently trash the selection as though they were expecting the logical underpinning and thread of a curated show, when this too isn’t the point. The Summer Exhibition is a marketplace. This year’s spartan hang meant that many who normally have work accepted lost out. In ten years editing art publications I have never received so many letters on a single topic as I did on this one. Good artists wrote that for the first time in decades and despite submitting their best they were rejected. As a result, a few whose incomes are already negligible will experience real hardship. Of course, no one has a right to exhibit but the Royal Academy, an institution run by and for artists, surely has a duty to look after artists’ interests. Two years ago the Academy stopped producing statistics in respect of the Summer Exhibition, presumably for the sensible reason that they might be used in evidence against them. Over the last decade there has been a steady erosion in the number of non-member, non-invitee exhibitors. Of this year’s 1,059 works, itself a reduction of around 10% over the last couple of years and just under a fifth over the last decade, 304 were paintings selected from the open, paying submission. The average total entry over the last decade has been between 11,000 and 13,000 works, so what is anyway a small chance of success has been further reduced. As the cost of non-member submission has increased so the chance of inclusion has diminished owing to the reduction in available room. Space has been squeezed by accommodating mini-one-man-shows – Fred Cuming this year, Frank Stella last, Hockney the year before (all widely exhibited artists). Another gallery is allocated to honorary RAs from abroad. This usually involves the hanging of signature works by big names who don’t need the exposure: it is a preposterous waste of space. Then there is the aforementioned new policy of inviting bores from the ‘cutting edge’ as a genuflection to State Art. Thus are artists’ incomes being sacrificed to the Academy’s desire for fashionability and upbeat critical reception. The present Academy is among the most craven of institutions. Consistently it makes the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons. It wants to be fashionable when there is no need for it to be; indeed, when there is a crying need for it to be everything but. It seems not to have realised that the fashionable in art is fostered handsomely elsewhere courtesy of many millions of public money, and networks of deserted galleries. The Royal Academy was opened in 1768 for two reasons: firstly, to set up a school and, secondly, to organise an annual exhibition “open to all artists of distinguished merit”, with the profits from the latter paying for the former. A student of art history has only to examine correspondence and journals to establish the importance of the Summer Exhibition in the careers and financial calculations of 18th and 19th century painters. Knowing that a failure in this highly visible forum would be conspicuous and disastrous, many grafted over the winter months in order to have something worth submitting. The objective was not only to best their colleagues in open competition but, as in Constable’s case, there was a yearning for the peace of mind and the potential of a reliable living wage which would be generated by Academy acclaim, a sale or a commission. For a month from September 14th the Royal Academy’s main galleries will be taken over by ‘The Galleries Show’, entrance £5. This is an art fair comprising the stands of 20 commercial art dealers which is being passed off as a ‘curated’ selection. “This innovative exhibition”, it says here, “will offer a dynamic insight into the creative activities of commercial galleries.” Phone the Academy if you want to know what ‘innovative’ means in this context... And of course only certain ‘commercial galleries’ qualify. Indeed, every one selected is the sort of State Art outlet which supplies nominees to the Turner Prize shortlist and whose artists are allegedly taking the world by storm. Some are “internationally renowned”. Why do they, therefore, need to show at the Academy? This squalid exercise even includes Lisson, whose artists enjoy block bookings at the Tate and whose exhibitions receive greater coverage in the papers than the Royal Academy’s own. Many of the chosen galleries are only minutes walk from Piccadilly. What is the real agenda behind this waste of the Academy’s space and, more pertinently, why have Academicians allowed it to happen? David Lee | |||||
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