A Beautiful Health Hazard at the Tate Modern

The curators and artist who created a participatory installation of porcelain sunflower seeds at the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London have nixed the participatory part. Only days after "Sunflower Seeds" opened to the public, visitors can no longer interact with the exhibit because the roughly 100 million artificial seeds created by villagers for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei are a potential source of toxic dust that may harm people's lungs.

"I could say I told them so, except I didn’t. I merely commented to my husband, as we looked down from the bridge a few days earlier, that the piece looked like an upper-respiratory disaster waiting to happen. It had not yet opened to the public, and was empty — except for one person off in the distance who was raking the seeds and wearing a surgical mask. That was a big clue," Roberta Smith writes in her Critics Notebook for The New York Times.

It turns out Weiwei's sunflower seeds are made using an unusual technique not normally used on porcelain; they are painted with a liquid clay, but not glazed. And so the paint simply rubs off. Visitors have reported their hands were coated with a grey film after touching the seeds. And little clouds of paint dust were seen floating in the air where people walked.

Understandably, visitors want to interact with the art, but not inhale it.