It’s easy to create a work of art these days, isn’t it? The doors of the gallery have been flung wide open. No need for years of training, life classes, copying old masters. It’s all been democratised, and anyone can do it. Right?
Well, that’s what some of us at the Daily Telegraph arts desk were hoping when we came up with the idea of trying to get into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
It’s the granddady of all open access shows, the country’s greatest opportunity − no, the world’s greatest opportunity − for painters to get their works on the walls of a prestigious gallery.
We knew the odds were stacked against us − there were, after all, almost 9,000 entries this year, and only 1,000 of them were successful. But working on the arts desk would give us a head start, surely. We look at art all the time, write about it, commission articles on it, go to art galleries.
So, with the crazy carelessness of amateur climbers trying to scale Everest in their afternoon off, we set out to make art. There were the bureaucratic hoops to jump through − registration forms, entry forms, barcodes, sticky labels. But that wasn’t the big problem. The big problem was that we are journalists.
It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel, but give a journalist a deadline and he won’t think about starting until the night before. Suddenly the date for delivery was almost upon us and there were nervous questions about how long paint took to dry. One of us managed to create a sculpture without leaving the office, and on delivery day another could be seen waiting nervously on Buckingham Palace Road for a courier with an emergency framing job.
The results, though, amazed us. Even allowing for compulsory politeness to friends and colleagues, what we had produced didn’t seem too bad at all. Some had revealed unsuspected skill, others great imagination and others, well, a certain low cunning.
Did any of us get in? No. But we’d taken part in a remarkable British institution, we’d felt a sense of fellowship with the extraordinary community of have-a-go artists, and we had reawakened faculties which in some of us had lain dormant since childhood.
And we consoled ourselves with the thought cherished by rejected artists through the ages − the world isn’t ready for us yet.