Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of artistic activity in aboriginal communities across Australia. Western desert painting, in particular, has attracted the type of attention that in contemporary art simulates importance. Yet the reception of this art has been double-edged, since most observers have been responding to their own fantasies about an exotic and mysterious art, at the same time as a fascinated media has been talking about “Leonardos of the desert.” To paraphrase Sartre, it is particularly distressing to catch in the act something new, something we neither predicted