Went to see the new exhibition at the Tate Modern, a series of huge slides set up in the Turbine Hall by Carsten Höller. They were rather beautiful, and Tom enjoyed sliding down them a lot, though I don’t completely buy the artist’s description of why they were art:
For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.