The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026
A particular kind of optimism is required to climb the steps of Burlington House in June, and it is the same optimism that makes a man believe his third serious relationship will be different. I have been coming to the Summer Exhibition for years now, in the way that other people have a recurring dream about their teeth falling out, and each time I am assured by the Academy that this is the largest open-submission show in the world, as if largeness were a virtue and not a threat.
This year’s coordinator — there is always a coordinator, usually an RA of advancing years who has been given a theme and a free hand, which is the artistic equivalent of giving a toddler a Sharpie — has decided the show should be about Hope, or possibly Joy, or perhaps it was Resilience. The wall text used three words where none would have done. I read it twice and came away caring less than when I started.
Into the first gallery, then, where 1,400 works have been hung in the salon style, meaning floor to ceiling, meaning that a genuinely affecting charcoal nude is positioned eleven feet up and slightly behind a radiator, where it can be appreciated only by pigeons and the very tall. Below it, at eye level, hangs a screenprint of a flamingo wearing sunglasses. There is a red dot beside the flamingo. There is no red dot beside the nude. This tells you everything about the British public that you did not wish to know.
The price list, as ever, is the real artwork. Here is a small abstract by an Academician, three blue squares and a sense of unearned confidence, available to you for £48,000. Beside it, a meticulous watercolour of Salcombe harbour by a retired dentist from Surrey, four hundred hours of love and failing eyesight, yours for £180. The market, I have decided, is simply a machine for punishing effort.
I encountered, in Gallery III, a large installation involving neon tubing and the word DESIRE, which I am fairly sure I have seen at every Summer Exhibition since the Blair government. I encountered a bronze hare. There is always a bronze hare. Somewhere in Britain there is a foundry that produces nothing else, and the hares are released into the wild of the art world each summer like grouse, to be shot at by buyers from Cheltenham.
By Gallery VII I had stopped reading the labels and begun reading the visitors instead, which is the more honest exhibition. A man in linen explaining Cézanne to a woman who plainly knew more than he did. A school group being told to find their favourite, dear God, and write about it. A couple having the quiet, terminal argument that every couple has at the Summer Exhibition, somewhere around the watercolours, about whether they have time for the gift shop.
Reader, they did not have time for the gift shop. Nobody ever does. You leave Burlington House having seen everything and remembered nothing, clutching a postcard of the flamingo, into the indifferent traffic of Piccadilly.
Three stars, because there is always a bronze hare, and there is comfort in that
