I’m always excited about visiting the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.
One past year had a huge gorilla constructed from coat hangers. Another year I offered to take a reader of this blog on a free tour of the exhibition. Padmini took me up on it. I’ve been a fan. A defender.
But this year… It’s just…
Great to see old favourites – Norman Ackroyd, Anselm Kiefer, Barbara Rae and others. But overall it just didn’t get me going.
It was the Austerity Measure from the Henningham Family Press that most caught my eye.
Like many of the exhibits, it was hung too high to properly appreciate. It wish I had a bigger picture to do it justice here.
It wasn’t the new layout – good to have a fresh approach. And the architectural models were more enticing than usual.
It was the thrill. The thrill had gone.
Blackwatertown 
I enjoyed this, probably for the wrong reasons. Looks more like a extravaganza bazaar. Probably not my place to quip, ‘lunch bag let down’ comes to mind. There so many reasons for an exhibition to fall short of expectations. The work. The volume of work. Placement of work. The space itself. Layout…..I didn’t realize they laid it out in such a way. Or, is it just me who thinks the big picture resembles an exploding piñata.
Enjoyed the duet.
There was good stuff there of course – and I mentioned redeeming features – but I was also shocked at some pretty poor work that crept in. (That’s me speaking from me ivory tower of non-expertise.)
The duet was pleasant but not worth almost 4 minutes of a lifetime. Was anything in the art exhibition as beautiful as the intro picture in your blog? With a lot of ‘art’ there seems to be a closed circle, talk it all up mechanism at work ie let’s say it is important even if it is rubbish. A similar mechanism seems to prevail in business boards; no executive decides his own salary, it is the non-executive who does but they circulate from board to board scratching each others financial back. News item yesterday the BBC has cut executive spending by 25%; what about that given wisdom that if we do not pay competitive salaries we will lose talent. I suspect that we will not see any mad rush of resignations.
What’s that phrase from Adam Smith? And could it apply to artists too?
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
@29: Trouble is, 29, that only AFTER you have spent four minutes, indeed years, of your life on something do you know whether it was worth it or not..And, unlike shopping at Marks & Spencer, you will not get a refund on time misspent.
U
Even at M&S you only get your money back – not the time.
No paisa vasool! Watch out for my post on the strange phrase.
I know it – wringing every ounce of value out of your money.