Prospect recommends: Earth, art of a changing world

Last year the Royal Academy staged the first in a series of three annual contemporary shows, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. Intended to allow the Royal Academy to take risks, that exhibition amounted to a great deal of clamour but rather less substance.

This year, the Royal Academy’s new director of exhibitions, Kathleen Soriano, successor to the irrepressible Norman Rosenthal, has taken a strong curatorial grip. Her ambition is to make galleries “places of relevance,” where the art reflects, or pioneers, society’s liveliest conversations.

For this show she is tackling a topic easily mishandled—climate change and its cultural impact. In contrast with the Barbican’s retrospective look at Land Art, Soriano has chosen to host a mix of headline artists—Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle, Gary Hume, Tacita Dean, Spencer Finch—and less familiar names, whose work addresses the theme from a variety of contemporary perspectives. Teaming up with David Buckland, director of the imaginative Cape Farewell project, they have included work by some of Buckland’s Arctic voyagers, but have been inspired more generally by the notion of the artist as explorer and witness.



The ambition, in Soriano’s words, is to show work “neither preachy nor literal,” but ultimately “about beauty and the sublime.” With a distinguished line-up, this might well be a good post-Copenhagen pick-me up.

This article first appeared in the December edition of Prospect