Cracking

Asterisk, over on A Blog About Nowt, has posted about Doris Salcedo's Tate Modern artwork, Shibboleth. Or "the crack" as it's inevitably become known.

It seems to be a requirement that the Turbine Hall installations can be summed up with a single noun - the slides (Carston Holler's Test Site), the boxes (Rachael Whiteread's Embankment), the sun (Olarur Eliasson's The Weather Project).

Anyway, from ground level I wasn't overawed, though it did make me smile. But going up a level or two and looking down was more interesting - you could see people trying to make sense of the crack by walking its length, peering in and straddling it. At this stage, the work seemed to gain profundity: the puzzled spectators become part of the work, and its message - if there can be such a thing - is the world's reaction to it. So in the end, I was well up for the crack.