Surreal hits the heights at the V&A

The curator, Gareth Williams, is a very good writer and theorist who has identified a strand in contemporary design and persuasively argued it with 50 pieces. His well-presented outing looks at what is now called "design-art". Designers make short-edition, fantasy-imbued items that are "self-motivated rather than commissioned". Or, as the entrance board says, "personal statements or manifestos" — which translates into very, very expensive design.

The show is themed in three rooms. The first,
The Forest Glade, is dominated by Tord Boontje’s Fig Leaf wardrobe, whose curved doors are made from 616 copper leaves enamelled by Manchester craftspeople, with a bronze tree inside to hang clothes on. The second, half-mirrored, room includes the Robber Baron series by Dutch duo Studio Job, inspired by 19th-century American industrialists. This is dominated by Job Smeets’s extravagant works: a mirror-polished bronze-and-black table, an armoire with a hole blown through it and a jewel-safe with a clown’s head on it.

Smeets’s items are eye-catching and provocative, even cartoonish — but Marcel Wanders’s gigantic polyester Bella Barbara bell is lazy. It is described by Wanders as "girls in fancy dress floating overhead" but you would not want this floating over your head. And Jeroen Verhoeven’s Cinderella table, laser-cut from a huge lump of marble, most of it removed, begs the question about wasting valuable material.

The last room, Heaven and Hell, is the most provocative. A sheepskin-padded skull that two people can sit in with the door closed; a teapot cast like another skull with a water-rat fur cosy like a bonnet; a desirable parquetry settle of laser-cut rosewood and maple patterned with skeletons. But a "rug" of red resin puddled on the floor, using the blood-volume of two people, is not interesting, while a cast from a dead calf’s stomach is both offensive and bland.
Fantasy? Yes. Fear? No. But it’s the best show of surrealism so far this century.

Telling tales: Fear and fantasy in contemporary design
Victoria & Albert Museum
SW7