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ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION
and Richard E. Grant
This review will discuss the video of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2015) starring Richard E Grant. I will be focussing on its’ objective and the means to achieve it.
From the top of my head I generally thought videos about exhibitions were made to discuss and present the exhibition in a quick way, like some sort of summary or introduction, like an amuse bouche, as well as promotional. But then again ‘promotional’ might not mean the same thing to everyone, or not every exhibition needs the same type of promotion. In this case, the question is, what is the purpose of the video? Let’s look at it from a promotional point of view. There now is a second question, why Richard E Grant?
Richard E Grant is an English actor, director, screenwriter and also art buyer, therefore a popular english figure I suppose. The protagonist of the video, surprisingly, isn’t the exhibition but Richard E. Grant, it does not state any facts about the exhibition, the collections it contains or any object in particular. It feels more like we are following Grant around London as he goes to exhibitions and claims all the objects he finds exciting. Like a child in DisneyLand. Or any other human being anywhere else. The approach to this video in promoting the exhibition I suppose was to bring in someone popular to the english public, someone likeable and show the video as a personal experience for this character therefore projecting the exhibition as something more entertaining rather than educational. Which is what is generally expected from a promotional video for an exhibition, in my opinion.
I personally found this approach a little disappointing. I do appreciate the idea of projecting the exhibition as something exciting as educational can often come across as boring. But, where I am disappointed is that they chose Richard E Grant as their protagonist but did not use that to their full advantage as he must have some knowledge on art, which did not come across at all in the video. In my opinion it was poor use of the means they had. It is of poor knowledge to just take for granted that educational is boring and that this perception cannot be changed.
So, what do we take away from this video, do we even remember what exhibition it is? or did we just watch Richard E Grant having some fun thinking of how he was going to spend his money?
SALOMÉ GAUTIER 