The Shanghai Contemporary art fair opened a few days ago at the Shanghai Exhibition Center (that's the big "palace" across from the Portman"). The Shanghai Eye has some coverage. In today's Shanghai Morning Post, the exhibition garnered a front-page headline and a full spread on page 3 of three articles. The front page headline:

Performance Art, So Profound It's Impossible To Understand

(行为艺术,"深刻"得看不懂)

First article title and subtitle:

For Floating-Basin "Performance", Suzhou Creek Closed To Traffic For Three Hours

Exhibitors: Art was a public service with a ecological theme, claim to promote "society being open-minded to art" • Spectators largely clueless

The article goes on to say that many people fished the basins out of the water and took them home for clothes-washing and planting flowers.

Second article:

Apples In Exhibit Rot And Stink, Eaten By Audience

The sections in that article are titled "Artist doesn't appear nor explain his art" and "Audience reckons that eating the apples is reasonable"

Third article:

Many Exhibits Depend On Viewer's Imagination

The article goes on to describe "a pile" of "amusing and hard-to-understand" exhibits and asks WTF they mean, noting that most exhibits give no explanations and are simply labeled with the artist's name and a title, some even lacking a title.

Could the Shanghai Morning Post be of the opinion that artists are out of touch with the common man?