RA Summer Exhibition
Sunday, June 05, 2005
London was sticky today, and nowhere more so than in the main galleries of the Royal Academy where the family headed this morning for a 'private viewing' of this year's Summer Exhibition. I say 'private viewing' because that's how it's described on the invitation but it's only private in the sense that if they crammed any more people in we'd all suffocate.
I get a family invitation each year because I'm a 'friend' of the RA - the result of some past drunken form signing and an annual amnesia about cancelling the direct debit. For the last few years something else has inevitable cropped up on the Sunday in question but this year we finally made it.
The kids took it all rather well, considering. We more or less raced round and Kirstie was loudly complaining of boredom by the end but, although Laura and I would probably have taken it all at a more leisurely pace had we been on our own, I can't say that there was too much that would have held me back for more than a cursory revisit.
A very large proportion of the stuff was already marked as sold, much to the horror of the children: they found both the prices and the level of painting skill to be shocking in direct proportion to one another. The walls of the galleries where the smaller pictures hang are a patchwork of styles and colours and sizes. There were a lot of manipulated photographs. As ever with such an overbearing amount of stuff it was the humorous that tended to stand out. We eveb checked the price of a small painting of a man with an aubergine for a head but it was £700 and about £699 over our budget. Perhaps we could have stretched to a radish instead.
I get a family invitation each year because I'm a 'friend' of the RA - the result of some past drunken form signing and an annual amnesia about cancelling the direct debit. For the last few years something else has inevitable cropped up on the Sunday in question but this year we finally made it.
The kids took it all rather well, considering. We more or less raced round and Kirstie was loudly complaining of boredom by the end but, although Laura and I would probably have taken it all at a more leisurely pace had we been on our own, I can't say that there was too much that would have held me back for more than a cursory revisit.
A very large proportion of the stuff was already marked as sold, much to the horror of the children: they found both the prices and the level of painting skill to be shocking in direct proportion to one another. The walls of the galleries where the smaller pictures hang are a patchwork of styles and colours and sizes. There were a lot of manipulated photographs. As ever with such an overbearing amount of stuff it was the humorous that tended to stand out. We eveb checked the price of a small painting of a man with an aubergine for a head but it was £700 and about £699 over our budget. Perhaps we could have stretched to a radish instead.
