Is Anish Kapoor’s exhibition suitable for a first date?

Esther Walker says...

Get your head in the right place and Anish Kapoor's new exhibition could be the most carnal collection of artwork you will see all year.

Forget peering at Jonathan Yeo's porn-mag collages to make out the individual rude bits, or staggering back in horror at Jake and Dinos Chapman's scary penis-nose sculptures; enter the Royal Academy in the right state of mind and you'll be as randy as a Victorian gent who's caught sight of a piano leg. But then, all art seems to end up being about sex — or oppression.

I think the art world could do with more expressions of the humdrum. How I long to see an exhibition where the works have titles like Lost Car Keys (2005) or Anguish! No More Loo Paper (2008).

Anyway, with Kapoor it all seems mostly about sex. The representation of a pregnant belly (When I Am Pregnant) swells into the thin air of the first gallery halfway up the wall, a symbol of fertility and a reminder of the act. It gets more explicit: Shooting into the Corner was first shown in Vienna, the city in which Freud introduced psychoanalysis to the world.

He would have had a field day with this, a cannon that shoots blobs of red wax at a white wall, in a symbolic act of violence that you stand idly by and watch. It is a comment on society's response to rape, or female degradation or something (and to think I nearly did an A-level in art history).

All I know is: it's rude. And Svayambh is downright dirty — a vast block of the omnipresent red wax moving infinitesimally slowly, on rails, through five of the main galleries. As it squeezes through the Academy's dainty arches it leaves sloppy red gunk all over the arch and the floor. I mean, a large, red, springy-looking long thing squeezing wetly through delicate openings?

You might as well be at a live sex show Of course, you would never, ever take a date here. Not because you'd be so overwhelmed with lust that you'd rip each other's clothes off in Green Park, or so appalled that you'll get no more than a peck on the cheek, but because only pretentious creeps suggest dates to art exhibitions. Go out to dinner; leave the controversial exhibitions for when you've run out of conversation.

Nirpal Dhaliwal says...

Modern art makes for a notoriously difficult dating scenario in the early stages of a relationship. Nothing is more likely to reveal and amplify any hint of dim-wittedness or dilettantism in either of you than contemplating the conceptual work of a great artist. Hearing someone ignorantly dismiss a work of genius or mouth pretentious platitudes and prattle inanely in the hope of seeming clever is enough to make you want to dump them on the spot and explore the gallery for more intelligent company.

Luckily, Anish Kapoor's retrospective is about as viewer-friendly as an exhibition of radical modern art can be. It's witty, colourful, awesome in scale and enormously engaging and interactive.

I've never spoken to more complete strangers in a gallery before, as visitors openly shared their delight, excitement and bemusement with each other. Grown adults returned to infancy as they pondered themselves in a room of his beautifully cast steel mirrors, gurning at themselves with no awareness of the people gathering behind (who couldn't be seen in reflection) giggling at the silliness.