“Making Space” is the theme of this Summer Exhibition — which is appropriate because that, in a sense, is what the annual Royal Academy show does. Arriving in London every June like some visitor from the regions, as much a part of the season as strawberries at Wimbledon, it professes to know little of fashion. And so, as our cosseted contemporary artists take off this week for the Venice Biennale, the Royal Academy makes space for what most people like to call “proper art”.

This is the usual hotch-potch of pieces involving anything from oil on canvas to egg cartons, some hung so high that you can hardly see them, others low enough to trip over. The summer show is the art world’s annual jumble sale: you can pick up anything from a vast canvas by a venerable Royal Academician to a tiny print by some talented amateur. And this year, for the first time, just as most of the art world declares video to be out of fashion, the Royal Academy decides to add a film room.

Feathers were ruffled last year when Tracey Emin was invited to set out her stall. This year the Academy reverts to more conventional co-ordinators. And though Emin and other Brit-pack members (including Damien Hirst, whose silver St Bartholomew stands in the central hall, flayed skin dangling like the bespoke patterns of some Savile Row tailor) are represented, most of their contributions would not frighten the horses — or indeed disturb all those lazily blinking Elizabeth Blackadder cats.

Regular visitors will find most of the old familiars. I always look out for Norman Ackroyd’s crepuscular etchings and Craigie Aitchison’s crucifixions. Here are the works by the roped-in honorary members, including Robert Rauschenberg (who died this time last year), and the predictable contributions of such populists as Ken Howard. If I was going to take home an open submission, I might choose the little fairytale-with-a-flipside print by Tom Hammick or Hannah Birkett’s diaphanous abstract.

The highlights include a huge, atmospheric Anselm Kiefer triptych, its snowbound forests as brooding and beautiful as an opera set; a great rusting chunk of Antony Caro sculpture, and a John Hoyland abstract Lost in Blue. The biggest disappointment is Cy Twombly’s big blowsy roses, so lacking in the subtlety of his wonderful Tate Modern retrospective last year.

Will Alsop curated the architectural gallery, though he raised the cases so high that I couldn’t see into half of them. The architectural trend at the moment seems to be for houses made, like hives, out of Identikit cells.

The Summer Exhibition, thankfully, is not so neat. It feels more like some Heath Robinson contraption. You can tinker about with the parts, but it still keeps on functioning in much the same way year after year.

Summer Exhibition 2009 opens at the Royal Academy on June 8

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