The Victoria and Albert Museum is currently running an exhibition of Art Deco objects, and my husband and I went to see it on the 3rd of July. It's hard to know what to make of it. What is there, is superb. A Ruhl dressing table, a couple of paintings by Tamara de Lempica, Cartier neccessaires and many of the iconic pieces of art deco that you see in books on the subject. What disappointed me was what was not there. The exhibition is tiny. I can appreciate that the high (£8) entrance fee helps to cover the cost of insuring such marvellous items, but it still feels as though the visitor is getting very little for his money. The Cartier neccessaires, for example, were among a handful of items designed to show how the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb affected the style of the decade. I should have liked to see more examples of how this style filtered down, and perhaps some less exclusive items alongside the neccessaires, things that showed how the Egyptian influence reached down through the strata of society. Likewise with the furniture and the fabrics; alongside Grey's famous 'canoe' chaise-longue, it would have been informative to see how such radical design affected more populist furniture. There was nothing wrong with the items on show, but because they were elements of an aesthetic taken to its ultimate point by very successful artists, one got very little impression of the underlying aesthetic.

What's more, the museum gives out audioguides, which encourage visitors to linger in front of items - all very well, but the objects should have been spaced out more because it was impossible to get a good look at any items, for when people finally moved out of the way in front, I was conscious of holding people up myself and felt the need to move on rapidly.

All in all, this was a very disappointing exhibition. It is due to go on tour in Canada and the US later this year, and I hope that other museums space the exhibits out more. If you do go to see it, make sure it's at a museum with many other articles from the period already on display because you can go round and look at them after visiting the exhibition - that's the good thing about the V&A; it has other exhibits from the period so you can view those after seeing the exhibition and get a clearer idea of art deco.