Critics split over Donwood and Yorke's Ashmolean show

Cherwell, Oxford's student paper, has given five stars to This Is What You Get, Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke's exhibition at the Ashmolean. It is the latest of two months of reviews that have split over whether the show should be judged as art at all.

The argument starts on the wall of the first room, where LPs, CDs, posters and T-shirts are racked as in a record shop and Donwood explains why galleries put him off. They're just intimidating – it's not very democratic. Whereas you go into a record shop and it's full of all kinds of oiks.⁴

Eddy Frankel, the Guardian's art critic, saw the show before it opened and liked that room best, as the setting the work was made for. He answered the wall text too: record shops can be as exclusive as galleries, and two artists hanging in the Ashmolean are part of the establishment now. Past the first room he found little to admire. The eight Kid A and Amnesiac canvases were a mess to him, the King of Limbs spiders and trees worse, and The Smile paintings the best of it without being brilliant. A fan would find plenty to enjoy, he allowed, but as art it was one bad painting after another.

Roisin O'Connor, writing in The Independent, took the other side. She found the show accessible and fascinating well beyond the fan base, and argued that judging it purely as an art exhibition forgets that the Ashmolean is a museum, not a gallery.

Olivia McEwan, for Hyperallergic, doubted the show's claim that the covers were made as art rather than as goods, since they exist to sell the records, and noticed there is no room for Pablo Honey. She still called it essential viewing for most visitors, a pilgrimage to the original covers. Min Chen of Artnet walked round with the curator, Lena Fritsch, and picked out the faxes and in-jokes among some 140 notebooks and letters, and a diagram of “Yorke's worries”. Donwood told her the pictures and the songs are hard to pull apart. I find it hard to look at [the art] without hearing the music. It's encoded.²

Zoë McGuire, the Cherwell reviewer, reckons on an hour at most, with “There There” in the headphones and early drafts of “My Iron Lung” on the wall. She also found a caption saying Donwood's first idea for the Hail to the Thief cover was giant topiary phalluses in National Trust gardens, an idea that went no further.

The reviews