Every June the Royal Academy’s Summer Show blows into London, as much a part of the season as strawberries, floral frocks and hay fever. And at a glance you might think that it always goes onwards unchanged. Here are the sunlit landscapes and the inoffensive still lives; here are the pet cats and the brightly coloured posies. And they all look very decorative. No wonder the interior designer, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, has been chosen to front the forthcoming BBC Two programme in which viewers will be invited to browse through the show.

But take another look and there are plenty of images to challenge even the most accommodating decorator. David Hockney, for a start, has submitted his largest painting. A grid of 50 smaller canvases makes up what feels like a life-sized landscape from his home county of Yorkshire. You would have to own a castle to accommodate it. Nearby hangs a huge Anselm Keiffer: a vast expanse of minefield mud. It is far from easy on the eye. The poppies that bluster across it look like lumps of broken flesh.

The Summer Show has changed a lot since the beginning of the millennium, when the pop artist Peter Blake was brought in as a curator to give tradition a shake. Of course, there is the usual assortment of offerings from academicians as well as memorials to two academy members who died last year, including the powerful Welsh landscapes of Kyffin Williams. The summer exhibition still delights in amateur painting. But it also concerns itself with offering a broader picture of the contemporary art world. There are pieces by big-shot Americans such as Bill Viola, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg for instance, and a collection of pioneering sculptors from Germany. Besides, last year’s rebels soon grow up into this year’s academy worthies. Here are the slick stylisations of the father of Brit Art, Michael Craig-Martin, as well as an angelic little neon by Tracey Emin.

For the first time, a gallery has been given over to photography. And invited artists make striking contributions. They include Chris Levine, who flashes the word “love” on our startled brains, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who contribute a pair of copulating rats, and Tony Oursler, whose video-work nags and threatens to harrowing effect.

Politics, however, is still not really discussed. If it was not for the work of Michael Sandle, who dashed off an angry “Iraq triptych” (at its centre are a naked Tony and Cherie being cast out of Downing Street like Adam and Eve out of Eden), or the former war artist, John Keane, the Middle East scarcely features. Yet, in other contemporary art shows, it dominates.

If the Summer Show remains a bit of a dinosaur, at least it knows it. A herd of prehistoric beasts – sculpted by the Chapman brothers – roam about the courtyard.

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