In a review entitled ‘A desert of new ideas’, The Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak canned the first survey exhibition of Australian art in the UK for 50 years as a ‘beaut idea’ that had failed to deliver, employing a series of human waste metaphors to illustrate his opinion.
The exhibition of 200 key Australian works opened last week at the Royal Academy in London to mixed reviews. The Times gave the exhibition four out of five stars and The Telegraph praised it as ‘detailed, comprehensive, omniscient, in places beautiful’.