First published in The Jackdaw ♯12, October 2001 Will Harvey demonstrates how the RA Summer Exhibition performs a useful function for those who can’t get their works easily exhibited elsewhere… Thousands of paintings are entered for the RA Summer Exhibition. A few squeeze through the jury. Fewer still get past the Hanging Committee and onto a wall. (members – RAs […]
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 strongly suspects that were the […]
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 run into millions… Not all […]
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 to some form of expression […]
… 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 the same show exactly one […]
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 more bought in the last […]
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 museums and historical sites. Boring […]
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 claims made by artists that […]
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 keep quiet about them. But […]
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 the same small size (48 […]
