Modern Maintenance

Honestly, someone should do something about this crack at the heart of a major London tourist attraction. No wonder there's nothing else in the Turbine Hall - it's obviously unsafe to hold any heavy works of art. If it wasn't lined with tourists gawking at it then someone could fall in. (Apparently someone did ...)

Okay, okay, it's Art. Specifically it's Shibboleth by Doris Sacado. As cracks go I suppose it's quite clever, in engineering terms. I'm guessing a vertical trench was dug in the floor with power tools and this was then lined with a contoured mould to suggest that it had just cracked open. It looks like it just cracked open, with bits sticking out there and there so that sometimes you can't see the bottom, though it's only a few inches deep.

So, I have more admiration for this than I have for Tracey Emin's unmade bed, but that's not really an informative statement. Is it Art? I will admit that you can stand and look at it, and your mind goes into neutral, and strange neural connections occur, so on that basis it probably is. It might even be more Art than some of the pictures upstairs in the gallery. "If I did that for my GCSE," scoffed our resident GCSE Art student of a Mark Rothko, "I'd fail."

I thought I had taken a photo of the Boy's feet, one either side of the crack, which would doubtless make a profound artistic statement to the right kind of mind - but my camera seems to have rejected it. Everyone's a critic.