First! That is the exultant boast for this year’s Turner prize – the first shortlist composed entirely of collectives. The first work conceived outside the gallery system. The first time the show has been held in the Midlands, and represents every nation of the UK; certainly the first array of “pocket utopias” and “community initiatives”. Five collectives are involved, but anyone half alert can deduce a sixth – none other than the jury itself. For its members clearly agreed upon a fundamental principle to select only groups intent on the greater social good, as opposed to artists working for art’s sake (or, God forbid, by themselves). In a pandemic year, with so few contemporary exhibitions and so much national suffering, this might seem a moral imperative, but the question is whose welfare it serves. If you have never heard of any of these groups – except perhaps Cooking Sections, who have shown at Tate Britain – then you aren’t alone. Neither had the lead curator of this show. Indeed several shortlisted participants have gone so far as to point out, in gracious wall panels, that they are not artists but ministers, youth workers, civil rights leaders, conflict resolution trainers. One group even issued a counterblast to the whole idea of being “exploited” by the Turner for diversity purposes. They got my vote in this respect. Gentle/Radical are based in Cardiff. They are less art collective than local group therapy. A split screen shows one man recalling his Palestinian grandmother, while another meditates and a third walks in the sun. There are singing groups, self-care groups and uplifting adages. G/R have never exhibited before, and with great respect are not doing so now. For what they make, together, can hardly be displayed in a gallery. Belfast’s Array Collective have built a mock pub that sits somewhere between the old – an empty Ian Paisley suit, stuffed with straw, nursing its drink – and the utopian future. Look in the bar mirror and the slogan says “This Person Supports a Ban on Conversion Therapy”. Look up and the ceiling is slung with banners – “Get Your Rosaries off My Ovaries”. A giant screen shows clips of carnivalesque revues in which Britannia gets her kit off and a gay comedian relates the mythical triumph of the fairies over the Christians. The pub rules insist you have a laugh. Perhaps you had to be there, so to speak, to have any idea of the ultimate value – social, let alone humorous – of Array’s activities. (The T-shirt slogan “Eire Says Relax”, apparently so weak, might gather strength in context.) And so it is with BOSS, AKA the queer, trans and non-binary BPOC Black Obsidian Sound System. BOSS follows the legacies of early sound system culture – DJs and MCs playing reggae on stacks of homemade speakers – with live performances and the distribution of its systems to communities for low rents or free. A totem pole of speakers, crowned with plates vibrating to its frequency, sits at the heart of an installation of screens and thrumming boxes, footage of club nights intercut with oral history. I cannot believe that BOSS’s achievements are well served with the addition of black vinyl drapes and at least one barely audible speaker. Well may they complain of being desirable but “quickly dispensable” to the Tate establishment, and of the inconsistency of shortlisting collectives while failing to honour the collective needs of Tate staff. Cooking Sections has another instalment of its son-et-lumière campaign against factory-farmed salmon. It is beautiful enough: eight ever-changing projections of water farms playing like spotlights on the floor to a narrative of fish as activists, trying to escape the nets of man’s inhumanity. The collective has managed to persuade several Skye restaurants to remove farmed salmon from their menus, if they are to be judged for their social efficacy. But that is a red herring, in the end, no matter how morally engaged the jury or its shortlist. Nobody is here for the activism alone. The show’s most riveting gallery is filled with marvellous paintings and drawings that do not in themselves have anything to do with social practice, except that they were created within Hastings’s Project Art Works studios. A wondrous whale, shimmering like a ghost in graphite, by Neville Jermyn. Siddharth Gadiyar’s teeming target abstracts. A terrifically forceful self-portrait by Sharif Persaud, decisive in its shape-making as an Arshile Gorky portrait. There are hundreds of images and more to come, as canvases await the arrival of PAW artists who will visit throughout the show. The reason they are included, however, is as patronising as it is doubtless well intended: PAW exists to support artists of neurodiversity. It would be unconscionable to favour one collective over another, against the whole ethos of this year’s selection. There can be no winner since nothing – not the work, the medium, the principles nor the social value – can be compared. After the Turner’s long and rebarbative history, its absurd anomalies and blatant conflicts of interest, it would be good to see the prize finally implode. But still there is money to be awarded, and this year it will have to be shared between all of these deserving collectives: £60k distributed among (by my count) more than a hundred people; the splitting of the atomic particle. Siddharth Gadiyar also appears in this year’s delayed Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, curated by Yinka Shonibare, whose genial smile is the first thing you see in a slightly hagiographic portrait. And there are others: knitted tributes to Yayoi Kusama and Sonia Boyce, a wan self-portrait by Gillian Wearing out of Gwen John, three separate homages to Captain Sir Tom Moore (including one in stolid bronze). But Shonibare has chosen many black artists, opening with the startling pictographic drawings of the former slave Bill Traylor. There are sardonic sculptures by the Beninese Romuald Hazoumè, a haunting map of Africa by the African American artist Ellen Gallagher that seems to metamorphose into an elephant’s head, and a tremendous table-top traffic jam involving hundreds of toy cars, black dolls trying to clamber over them to freedom. By the British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové, its pithy title is Exodus. A vein of exuberance runs all the way through, not least because there are so many more kinds of art on show. Quilts, embroideries, collages of flattened cans, sculptures worked in rope, wool, beads and sequins, figures swathed in African batik (and not just by Shonibare himself). It lifts some of the more etiolated watercolour landscapes, talks over the quieter prints. Still this pro-am fixture is far too large, with almost 1,400 exhibits; and still it is an eye test, trying to appreciate small paintings skied towards the ceiling, or refocus between delicate monochrome and blazing colour. And still the grander Royal Academicians submit the same old works (Anselm Kiefer’s magniloquent history painting this year features a whole 3D axe, stuck into its surface). But Shonibare’s edition shows signs of overdue renewal, in all its variety, range and equality, that not even the immutable scenes of Venice can subdue. Star ratings (out of five) Turner prize 2021 ★★ Summer Exhibition ★★★★ The Turner Prize 2021 is a the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, until 12 January