A Survivor’s Guide to: The RA Summer Exhibition

1) Take a bottle of water and please have some food before hand because once you get in there’s no easy way out, and it’ll be at least an hour and a half of observation. 

2) Invest in a pair of binoculars to view the works that are just below the ceiling and five paintings up.

3) If you are short for time quickly browse the index at the back of the ‘List of Works’ that they will give you with your ticket, mark the artists you would be interested in and sprint from room to room.

4) Eventually you will want to play the ‘Where can you imagine that?’ game. Behind a large corporate reception desk? In a footballers home? On an East London wall? 

5) A good way to filter through what is publicly popular or not is by looking at how many red sales dots a piece has, so it is often best to hold your visit until the latter weeks. Quentin Blake’s Life Under Water prints had an entire red ant line running along them.