An announcement arrived in my inbox this morning alerting me that an artist has set up a giant bed for people to have sex on in a former church basement in London. The installation is called Sweet Mamma Are You Happy With My Sweet Love, and the artist's reasoning is this:

“What is paramount,” [Jota] Castro says, “is that [my] installations do not exist as a work of art without the participation of the public. They live because the people give them life. Generally spectators are ‘voyeurs’; With this installation, spectators can also be actors.”

This is BS because the setup is boring and obvious. It's a cross-shaped bed. In a church. That you can use. It is simply not clever.

It's good that nobody wants to be a white-cube snob anymore and everybody wants to touch things and get down in it and whatnot-have-you-and-et-cetera, but passing off mere interactivity as an end in itself is lazy.

Interactivity hereby joins such debased categories as nature, the subconscious, shock, and whimsy.