You leave the show irked by the many fine sculptors who have been excluded

摘要

A century ago the academy was the enemy of artists and architects, a conservative bastion against change and renewal. Once again the academy has become the enemy, or at least its theory-inflected modes of thinking, more concerned with spinning verbiage around an artwork than with the artefact itself. Such thinking has spread beyond the academy to infect also criticism and curatorship. An example of what results is, aptly enough, on show at the exhibition Modern British Sculpture, curated by Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson at the Royal Academy of Arts.