The RA Summer Exhibition is a tsunami of smug, hackneyed eco-art

“Climate” is the concept of the 254th annual Summertime Exhibition at the Royal Academy, and at every switch there are apocalyptic photographs of wildfires, wastelands and fallen trees, all presaging the end of the planet. A sculpture of a blackened palm, ingeniously fashioned from blown-out tyres, laments man’s harmful affect on the environment in the central rotunda, three floppy, material penguins, like costumes from a dressing-up box, are organized again-to-back atop a ziggurat: a trio of martyrs on a pyre.

However, given the seriousness of the subject – selected by this year’s “co-ordinator”, the British sculptor Alison Wilding – why does all the things sense so genteel? Only the Royal Academy could get a topic as urgent and consequential as the climate unexpected emergency, and create a thing this comfy, as typical as a village fête. With the majority of these 1,465 operates, as ever, submissions from the general public, hung alongside contributions from lots of Academicians, this Summer Exhibition has the similar motley, colourful, jamboree-like high-quality as its predecessors. 

By some means, throughout the 13 rooms (as well as the vestibule and courtyard), exhausted research of hydrangeas and chrysanthemums nonetheless get a search-in, as do stale Venetian views – presumably justified mainly because the lagoon continues to rise. Furthermore, Humphrey Ocean’s suave gouaches of fowl with comically enlarged feet. (Considering that when, however, were coots an endangered species?) Only David Hockney, the most well-known Academician of all, is absent – oddly, considering the fact that he likes to paint the arrival of spring. 

The issues is not that environmentalism is mainstream – witness Prince William’s speech at the Platinum Jubilee concert a 7 days ago – extra that when art parrots the consensus, it is dull. “Attenborough is God,” reads the slogan on a T-shirt in a little screenprint embellished with gold leaf. Potentially, but the artist who created it should heed a word printed in block capitals nearby: “Hackneyed”. (Nicely carried out, Grayson Perry, for which include the latter so prominently in just one of the two galleries he’s hung, against lemon-yellow partitions, devoted typically to prints.) 

If the endlessness of the show doesn’t get you down, the banality of the insights on supply will. “The Planet is F—-d,” asserts a plaque of plastic blocks, which appears like an embroidered sampler. A reclining ceramic badger contemplates a cranium balanced on a person paw: alas, very poor Yorick, you have been travestied! A multitude of mediocre art has the literalness of news footage, and prompts the dilemma: what is the issue of any of it? Far more than a single Academician tasked with hanging a home resorts to grouping jointly shots by type, in the method of an interior designer arranging books by the colors of their spines. Below, a wall of flower paintings there, a fuzzy nimbus of canvases depicting clouds. The only shock is that so minimal tackles the depredation of our oceans. Rana Begum’s neon fishing nets are an exception.