Offline Demonstrations Lack Impact?

Did you pop upstairs to see the Louise Bourgeoise show, which was a spectacular collection of her life work, touching on her family, home, sexual and female as art?12:08 AMOn Sunday I was cycling briskly along the river past Westminster when I was stopped in my tracks by a cavalcade of whistles, drums and people in fancy dress. Sadly there were no horses that I could see. This had two immediate effects - a two minute spectacle that was really quite entertaining and then, far, far better, the opportunity to cycle along the river from Westminster pretty much to Tower Bridge without so much as a car on my side of the road. The cavalcade was, I gather, in protest against NHS cuts. The organisers say some 7,000 people turned out in support (um, protest I mean). Apparently this was a lower than expected turnout because all the senior people in the unions had expected an election to be called on November 1st and so had put plans for the protest on hold. I'm wondering how many other things have been ahem, blamed on the lack of an election.I was on my way to the Tate Modern to see "Shibboleth", Doris Salcedo's new installation. Or, perhaps more accurately, de-installation. Somehow, Doris or someone Doris knows with a succession of power drills of varying sizes has drilled a long, parallel sided crack from one end of the Turbine Hall to the other. Not only that, but the sides of the crack give the impression that the rock was torn apart - with overlapping edges and bumps sticking out and recessing on each side. It really is a stunning "thing" to look at - and there were thousands there on Saturday, looking, touching, poking and prodding. You can imagine the Tate Board of Directors reacting to her pitch: "So you want to cut a hole in our floor?";"No, not a hole exactly - a crack, from one end to the other"; "A crack? Let me just think about that for a second". How on earth she got away with that I have no idea - but the result is quite brilliant. You'll spend more time trying to figure out how it was done than the average person spends solving the 43 billion billion combinations of a Rubik's Cube. A Shibboleth, by the by, is something - usually liguisitic I think - that identifies those from one region/country/place from another (check the Book of Judges for the detail on how this can get abused). These days it is just as much used to distinguish between those from the new wave of doing something versus the old wave.

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