The American artist and critic Brad Troemel once pointed out that art galleries have all turned into a kind of adult daycare, and ever since then I haven’t been able to visit a gallery without noticing it. Nearly two decades ago, Carsten Höller installed a set of big aluminium slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and they were undeniably good fun because going down slides is fun. It’s also fun, although maybe for a different type of person, to ask if going down slides counts as art. These days, though, you can hardly move for this stuff.
The world is already interactive. You walk around in it. You can steal things from shops
Last summer the Turbine Hall hosted a set of giant building blocks by Rasheed Araeen. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited a bubblegum-pink roller-coaster. It’s very rare for contemporary art to just show you an object; it always invites you to engage; to take an active part in producing it; to play and have fun.
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