Summer Exhibition 2012, Royal Academy of Arts, review Wandering through the finished show last week, I felt that the RA's efforts are slowly but surely beginning to pay off. At first, the 2012 instalment appears just like its predecessors, in that visitors are confronted by the same old mêlée of more than a thousand unrelated works of art, with myriad examples of painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and photography, as well as architectural models. As ever, the show is a hoary beast of an exhibition, bucking and resisting the best efforts of curators and critics to tame it by imposing order upon its heaving mass. This year's coordinator is the artist Tess Jaray, who assures us in the catalogue that "there is no single theme." You don't say. Next door, in the largest gallery, Jaray has adopted an unusual approach. Often a redoubt for massive canvases vying to dominate the eye, the vast hall has been filled with smaller works, lending a potentially cavernous space a cosier ambience. Scores of tiny pictures are jammed together in the lower half of each wall to form an overarching, undulating design, like a Mexican wave that rises and dwindles around the viewer. The hang is not without its critics, who argue that individual works of art have been sacrificed to the overall effect. Yet I think that Jaray has her cake and eats it: upon entering the gallery, the wave motif is appealing and unexpected, but you forget about it as soon as you are up close with the paintings. I was pleased to see that one of the works I admired when rummaging through the RA's vaults during the selection process while filming the new documentary has made it into the final show: a radiant egg-tempera portrait, measuring just 5in by 4in, of a young man by Robin Lee-Hall. Elsewhere there are works by a number of impressive names. Anselm Kiefer offers Samson, a gigantic creation measuring almost 6ft by 12ft, in which a rifle hovers in front of an epic mountain practically sculpted out of impasto paint. Michael Craig-Martin pulls off the difficult trick of standing out from the throng: his stark black painting of a door-handle commands respect, even if one suspects that it does so by bullying the viewer. Humphrey Ocean's splashy, spontaneous paintings have an air of dishevelled elegance. Phillip King offers several small, brightly coloured abstract sculptures with a delightful spring in their step. There is a charred-oak sculpture with a wonderfully velvety texture like kitten fur by the under-appreciated David Nash. I loved the sensuousness of a dark-red sculpture by Ana Genovés: the size of a postbox, it resembles an upright lilo sculpted out of lipstick. I smiled at Martin Creed's Work No 623, a green-neon sign spelling out "DOGS": mischievously close to "God," the glowing word bedevils the idea that works of art offer illumination, which feels appropriate enough for godless 21st-century Britain. This is the pleasure of the Summer Exhibition: to browse the galleries slowly and follow one's nose. Of course there will be stuff that won't be to your taste: Ken Howard is a perennial fixture, yet his crowded paintings are a throwback to the Summer Exhibition of old. Raqib Shaw is fashionable in the auction room, but his Last Lament of the First Man of the Universe is nothing but glitz. David Mach's snarling leopard sculpted out of coat hangers feels glib. But this is part of the Summer Exhibition's point: the rough-and-tumble of so many diverse works jostling together is a microcosm of British democracy. You may not like what everyone has to say, but thankfully there is a platform for artists of so many different stripes. It still isn't cool to be a fan of the RA's annual, ungainly Summer Exhibition. But it's getting there. From June 4 until Aug 12. Alastair Sooke presents a 'Culture Show" special on the RA Summer Exhibition on BBC Two on June 15