High Culture Noise

Below is a view of one of the major display floors in London's Tate Modern Gallery & Museum.

No, the Tate was not hit by an earthquake, nor was the building contractor at fault. What you’re looking at is...a work of art on display at the Tate titled, Shibboleth.

Honest. Would we joke about a thing like that?

What’s that? Why is that crack in the floor titled Shibboleth, and what makes it a work of art?

What an airheaded, reactionary philistine you are not to be able to grasp that for yourself. I mean it’s clear to any art connoisseur that the work is a work of art (it's on display in a revered art museum, is it not?), and

represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a third-world person coming into the heart of Europe,

as the artist, Doris Salcedo, put it.

Or as the curators at the Tate put it:

Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A shibboleth is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

Did you really need the artist and the curators to spell it all out for you like that?

Yeah, well, it’s a dirty job, but someone had to do it.

And here we thought the noisemakers and acoustic experimenters from Cage to Boulez to Stockhausen and beyond were the true charlatans of high culture.

O tempora! O mores!

You can read more justification of the crack as a work of art here.