The RA selected 1,700 works for its summer exhibition – but almost 10 times that number were rejected. Now some have a place to shine at last

If you read the Guardian’s recent evisceration of the Royal Academy summer exhibition – “a miserable garden party of vapid good taste” – and felt bad for the artists involved, spare a thought for the ones who didn’t even make the grade.

Because while the RA selected 1,700 artworks to go on display this year, almost 10 times that number were rejected. Which means someone out there deemed them to have been of a lesser quality than the ones our critic Jonathan Jones labelled as “tepid, polite and pointless”. Ouch!