Open season: during the annual Summer Exhibition at London's Royal Academy, well-known contemporary artists shared quarters with countless Sunday painters - Summer Shows I - Critical Essay

Not long ago I overheard a conversation in which one Englishman mentioned to another that he'd been to Arizona and seen the old London Bridge that had been reassembled there in 1971. His friend chuckled and said, "You know what the great joke is? They thought they were buying the Tower Bridge!" at which they both had a good laugh--those naive Americans, fooling themselves again. And I thought to myself: The joke's on you--the Americans who bought that bridge never even heard of the Tower Bridge!

The more often we're told that the world has become more and more the same, the happier we are for any little reminder of foreignness. And what's true of the world in general is equally true of art. The big international blockbuster shows propose that information travels at the speed of light, that 20 curators on six continents know exactly the same 100 artists doing important work this year--few of whom, surely, will still be doing important work by the time the same biennial rolls around next. Maybe that's why, as I strolled through the galleries of the Royal Academy in early June on one of the preview days for its Summer Exhibition, a mischievous thought slipped unbidden into my mind: "How happy I am to be here and not doing my duty at the Documenta opening." A pleasant feeling of complacency came over me as I contemplated the sufferings of the art-hungry mob in Kassel; after all, hundreds of bad paintings surrounding a few good ones are so much less dreary than hundreds of bad video projections surrounding a few good ones. But all pleasure is founded in illusion; my friends returning from Germany over the next few days brought favorable reports. So much for schadenfreude. And yet the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition really was an enjoyable experience, in part because of its unfamiliarity--for me, this salon-style show seemed more redolent of the days of Diderot or Baudelaire than of the 21st century. For many in the English art world, of course, it is familiar to the point of invisibility, If not contempt--some of my English friends, reading this, are sure to write me off as one more American who's bought the wrong bridge.

The Summer Exhibition has been going on for 234 years and is described as "the largest open contemporary art exhibition in the world"--open" meaning that anyone can submit work for consideration. And it feels open--maybe too open for some tastes. Yes, there were some hierarchies in the hanging, which gave a certain minimal coherence to the proceedings. It began with several rooms, hung by Norman Rosenthal and veteran abstract painter (and ex-Photo-Realist) Maurice Cockrill, devoted to the work of the Academicians themselves, currently 76 in number. One of these is always a featured artist who gets a small one-person show in a separate room--this year it was Pop artist Allen Jones. (As usual, nearly all the works in the Summer Exhibition were for sale, at prices that ranged from under 100 [pounds sterling] to over 100,000 [pounds sterling] [approximately $150 to $150,000], with the Royal Academy collecting an additional 30 percent commission from each buyer.)

Another room was devoted to a curated show chosen by the youngest Royal Academician (RA), Gary Hume, who brought in a delicious breath of cosmopolitanism with excellent work by artists like Nicola Tyson, Simon Periton and the underrated Dutch painter Daan van Golden. Hume even managed to inject a bit of historical perspective with a Milton Avery painting while also including the Summer Exhibition's first-ever video work, by Georg Herold.

Then came several densely packed galleries filled with works selected by committee from the open submission; each of these rooms was hung by a different member of the Academy. Finally, there were rooms for works by Honorary RAs--famous foreigners like Frank: Stella and Georg Baselitz--and some rooms devoted to sculpture (also to be seen in the Academy courtyard), mixing RAs and others, as did a large hall given over to a multitude of works on paper. The feeling that each room had its own character, however hard to pin down, became essential to maintaining attention in a show that included over a thousand items.

Even so, an exhibition such as this throws responsibility for judgment squarely on the shoulders of the individual viewer. There's no depending on the imprimatur of a curator. In that sense, this hoary old academy, though it does have a jury and a big prize--the Royal Academy Charles Wollaston Award, worth 25,000 [pounds sterling] ($38,000)--seems far more democratic, and truer to the anti-authoritarian spirit of modernism, than any curated show can be. (This year, the Wollaston Award went to a non-Academician, the well-known painter of gray monochromes Alan Charlton, for his Vertical Painting in 20, one of the works selected by Hume.) Where else could you see pieces by international stars like Tony Cragg and Rachel Whiteread cheek by jowl with the efforts of amateur watercolorists? Good works lose nothing, as, it turns out, by this promiscuous mixing--indeed, they gain energy from their connection to the practice of art as a very mundane activity. And for all the fashionable talk about "art and the everyday" that we've heard in recent years, it's really the amateur watercolor that's got the direct line to the everyday; the more exalted products of the culture's kunstwollen need not be quarantined from it.