Coronavirus and the arts: The Royal Academy goes virtual

Something has happened at the Royal Academy: someone below the age of fifty, and very out-of-step with their normal non-pandemic membership and visitors, has taken over their social media. Their twitter account now asks for “daily doodles” on the themes of mermen (“muscles optional”), portraits of dogs from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, and more surreal artworks such as “a small gentleman on long stilts”. Alongside these really rather quite sweet – and well responded to – requests for amateur artwork are the Academy’s more bizarre artistic memes and sassy commentary. They posted a steely-eyed portrait by Arthur Hacker of Sir Frank Short with the caption “Us trying to find the epidemiology degrees of everyone on Twitter with an opinion” and mock those enjoying a weekend G&T with a sixty-second YouTube video explaining William Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

Of course, the RA, like many other galleries, have also been providing free virtual exhibition tours. The YouTube tour around their exhibition Picasso and Paper is an incredibly calming forty-minute experience – and far less crowded than a non-virtual exhibition – even if it does lack the fun of walking down Piccadilly on your way.

And yet, their pandemic media plan (if such a heinous thing exists) appears to be to avoid associating the virtual RA with anything like the rather imposing building in Mayfair which is perennially filled with somewhat scary aging pensioners in fur coats whatever the weather. (These are not just personal observations – I have found visitor statistics which corroborate my coat/age/daunting-nature suspicions). Their online persona is like an un-ending Summer Exhibition: all fun, colour, and satire. All that’s missing is Grayson Perry and a couple of on-the-nose Banksy paintings.

Now is probably not the time to debate whether reducing art to witty captions and mocking tweets helps encourage an engagement with cultural works, or whether it reduces works to one-dimensional satirical versions of themselves. Even if the RA is making its art engage with their Twitter followers in a way which can feel occasionally contrived or false (“Satan summoning his Legions” as a zoom background … really …), they are providing much needed levity in an otherwise quite dire twitter-sphere, and potentially encouraging reams of new visitors when everything can open up again.