You Crack Me Up

No Spasms, Just Chasms

The latest installation in the Tate Modern gallery's massive Turbine Hall is a 550-foot crack in the floor. Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's work "Shibboleth" starts as a hairline crack and widens to about a foot across. It cost about 300,000 pounds and took more than six months to complete. Salcedo, 49, refused to say how she managed seemingly to crack open a concrete floor but said it involved delicate and intricate sculpting. Asked how deep the fissure goes, she replied: "It's bottomless. It's as deep as humanity."

FOOTNOTE: King fissure.