Not enough worth buying at Summer Exhibition

There are many people, I have heard, who go to an art gallery only once a year and that is to see the Summer Exhibition. The conventional wisdom is that the secret of the show’s popularity lies in the open competition, the biggest in the world. A panel of judges select from around 10,000 submissions, with no regard to the fame of the artist. It’s the art world’s version of Britain’s Got Talent. Here, for once, the great British public can see an exhibition that has no intelligent organising principle at all, ie where everyone is equal.

But I have another theory: that after seeing an exhibition as chaotic and downright awful as this one, no one would wish to set foot in a gallery again for at least another year.

You have to make some concessions for a formula that has been going for 241 years (pedigree is another of its selling points) and which crams in 1,247 works of art. Amid the endless paintings of views of Venice and the Thames, still lives and harbours with fishing boats, you can find most of the better-known living British artists of the past 40 years.

Bill Woodrow contributes a skilful sculpture of a female torso, minimally indicated by thin twigs cast in bronze. A half-hearted painting of a cuddly toy by Tracey Emin floats between a sea of alternately loosely splurging and rigorously geometrical abstract painting. There’s Hirst’s terrible silver sculpture of a skinned saint, which I suppose he dug out of the back of the White Cube’s cupboard.

It’s a good to see the small army of established British abstract(ish) painters who operate nowadays under the media radar. Some are still on form — like Basil Beattie with his persistent motifs of train tracks — others like John Hoyland have gone off the boil (what are those messy splatterfests?). And somehow one of Cy Twombly’s enormous paintings of roses, shown earlier this year at Gagosian, has been spirited into the main room.

But the best work is a film by George Barber, a cult but totally underrated British video artist. In it, he gets passing cars to turn a road into an abstract expressionist painting by throwing buckets of paint on the tarmac and then letting the traffic drive through.

Almost all of this is for sale, for prices ranging from £1.99 to hundreds of thousands of pounds. You can’t see the wood for the trees in this jumble. Go if you must, but for God’s sake, don’t take your chequebook.

Until 16 August. Information: www.royalacademy.org.uk

Summer Exhibition
Royal Academy
Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1 0DB