A little of what you’ll fancy

In its most recent incarnation, in 1998, 2,000 artists submitted work. Only 150 pieces made the main selection, but almost 900 studios were opened and bus tours lurched shambolically around the back streets. You needed stout shoes and plenty of stamina even to think about tackling this car-boot-sale of a show.

This year, however, you can expect something rather more sedate. The East End Academy is looking decidedly professional. It’s not surprising. The cultural map has shifted in the past two decades. By the 1990s, as far as London’s contemporary scene was concerned, you could pretty well count out anything West of Park Lane. Chelsea had dropped off the edge of the art world. Cork Street was no longer central. The court of Bohemia had moved to Hoxton and Clerkenwell. And where “here be dragons” would once have been printed across those parts of the map that included Deptford or Hackney, now there were fingerposts pointing the way.

Homes sell for hundreds of thousands in the once down-at-heel districts of dockers. Brick Lane curry houses close in favour of fashion boutiques.Fashionable restaurants are adorned with works by the most stylish contemporaries.

Submission may still be open at the East End Academy. But the standards of art in the area have soared. The selection process is sharp as a sushi chef’s knives. The panel — including the Turner prize-winner Chris Ofili, who represented Britain at the last Venice Biennale — have chosen only 22 artists. And though only two of them are currently represented by galleries, only one is self-taught. If this show offers a snapshot of cultural developments, the picture is carefully posed.

The selection, however, evokes a rich sense of the variety of work going on. This show is a hotch-potch of methods and materials. Peter Peri questions the process of drawing. Louise Brierley presents disconcerting little narratives in oil. Lawrence Corby’s acrylics pare the abstract back to the limits of understatement. Davies and Sherwood’s bright, sculptural installation explodes like a bomb-blasted skateboard park across the corner of the space. Mandy Lee Jandrell uses photography to examine the ways in which experience may be mediated by different cultures. And of course there is lots of video.

What marks many of the pieces is their clarity. Because these artists are not established, they have to become their own publicists, making their points lucidly. Spectators quickly tap into the ideas of the largest, most ostentatious pieces, from Olivia Plender’s comic-strip account of the progress of the man who wants to create a masterpiece, through Zatorski & Zatorski’s film of The Last 3,600 Seconds of Wasp, to Caroline Mc Carthy’s installation in which dozens of packages of ready-prepared meals are arranged as if on the shelves of a hothouse, their garnishes presented as if they are sprouting like living seedlings.

Occasionally (as in the last work) this simplicity is at the expense of more understated pieces. The evocative subtlety of the video of Manuel Saiz, the only self-taught artist, is definitely worth a look.

To predict upcoming cultural trends from this show is premature, but a few broad tendencies emerge. The conceptual is out. Instead, artists go back to the grass roots of artistic talent, to drawing and to painting, examining their possibilities from a broad Modernist perspective. The grimmer aspects of the urban or suburban predicament are a subject, but so too is an imaginative, almost magical, world. And comic-strip animation has become a part of high culture. The artists who grew up in the pre-Game Boy era bring their childhood influences to bear on their perspective.

The more notable cultural shift at the moment is that of the art scene. The East End is no long the epicentre. It’s been a year or so since the Flowers Gallery opened another space in Cork Street, since such galleries as Houldsworth, Sprüth Magers Lee and Hauser & Wirth established themselves prominently in W1. This summer Michael Huw Williams opens a spacious new premises overlooking the Thames and Chelsea. And the New York heavyweight Larry Gagosian — apparently gazumped by Damien Hirst in his attempts to acquire a former scene-painting factory in Vauxhall — has opened instead in the erstwhile cultural wasteland of King’s Cross.

Meanwhile, events such as Art London and the Frieze Art Fair emphasise that the whole of the capital is a cultural market. Certainly, as Art Fortnight — a two-week programme of exhibitions, auctions and cultural events — opens next week, culture floods back into the heartlands of the city.

The stark, white cube aesthetic that has confined — and to an extent dictated — the contemporary look could even start to appear superseded as selected pieces from the collection of the entrepreneurial northern businessman Frank Cohen — “the Manchester Frick” — go on temporary display amid the gilded splendour of an 18th-century Mayfair house. Cohen, who caught the collecting bug when he purchased a Lowry painting in 1976, now pulls a selection of 30 pieces out of his warehouses for public display. He has clearly had plenty of problems with the space, not least with the cornelian-coloured marble of the lobby and with the glass chandeliers that dangle from the ceiling and drop in the middle of canvases.

But his tastes, which lean to the dark side of kitsch, to the sinister aspects of Pop, to the black joke, are strong enough to overcome them. Sculptures by Rachel Feinstein (particularly fashionable in New York, though Cohen says he was the first to collect her over here) could almost have been made for the settings in which they are now displayed. And Matt Collishaw’s video piece finds an evocative setting.

Members of the insider circle that once ringed the East End must now move outwards and mingle. A McDonald’s Crucifixion by Jake and Dinos Chapman competes with a Crucifixion by Feinstein. Their portrait of Hitler as a clown hangs alongside Marlene Dumas’s macabre painting of a hanged man.

Cohen’s distinctive taste can seem over-exuberant, almost bullying. But his personal selection includes a few pieces that, alone, would merit a trip to a look — not least a beautiful Michael Radecker.

This show makes an interesting complement to the East End Academy. Its breadth of vision bodes well for the up and coming — not least if it means that established artists will move back to Central London and free up a bit of the precious East End space.