Some might say it’s definitive proof that the galleries patronised by the country’s art cognoscenti are on a slippery slope to low-brow populism.

Kylie Minogue, the tomboyish mechanic from an Australian soap turned popstar, is coming to the V&A with her gold hot pants and revealing white jumpsuits.

Following on from the controversial installation of fairground helter skelters at Tate Modern, Kylie — The Exhibition will add ballast to criticisms that the art scene has dumbed down and fallen victim to the charms of celebrity culture.

The V&A said it was hoping to attract a younger audience to the museum with exhibits such as the pop singer’s gold hot pants, worn in the video for Spinning Around, and the revealing white jumpsuit from Can’t Get You out of My Head.

The exhibition will also include images of the singer from the mid1980s, when she came to fame as the tomboyish mechanic Charlene in the Australian soap opera Neighbours.

The museum has never staged a show devoted to a single pop star before, although it has displayed a selection of Elton John’s spectacles, and its collection includes costumes worn by Adam Ant.

If all this populist “art” is anathema to the purists however, Tate Modern can point to figures showing that, since its opening last October, Carsten Holler’s installation of five stainless steel slides has attracted 600,000 rides down its 80ft tubes. With another four months until the installation is removed, it is already the gallery’s most-visited exhibition. Tate Modern’s figures for the slides do not include the countless other visitors who have just gone to look.

The installation is not for the fainthearted. The gallery told The Times yesterday that four people had been injured, with three breaking or dislocating fingers and one breaking a wrist, for which they were still being treated. A spokeswoman for Tate Modern said: “Against the proportion of sliders, it’s a small number.” But she confirmed that the gallery was facing a compensation claim from one of the injured visitors.

She suggested that some of visitors may not have followed instructions about keeping their arms folded across the body as they descended. A decision to introduce protective elbow pads was about increasing comfort rather than because people were getting bruised, she added.

The installation, entitled Test Site, is the seventh in the annual commissions sponsored by Unilever, which began in 2000. Holler’s tubes of steel and Perspex snake through the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall within the former power station. The gallery, which has described Holler as one of the most important artists of his generation, has called the slides “impressive sculptures in their own right”. Its curators said that Holler’s interest in slides lay in the “inner spectacle experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend”.

By and large, the critics loved it. Although Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times had her doubts about the gallery’s long-term goals, she wrote: “The Belgian-born artist Carsten Holler installed five fairground slides to send visitors shooting through the spaces of Tate Modern. Who said Belgians were boring?”

Charles Thomson, of the Stuckist group that supports traditional forms of art, said that Tate and the V&A had become victims of celebrity culture. “Everybody wants to get in on the act,” he said. “It compromises integrity because the sway of glamour has overcome what used to be independent academic rigour. We have museums frozen like rabbits fixated in the headlights of celebrity culture.

“That said, I rather like Kylie Minogue so I may be tempted to go along.”

Verdicts on Test Site

“Galleries — all competing to present the next big experience, to be more impressive, more blatant, more instantly entertaining — risk losing touch with something much more profound”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

“Is it art? Clearly not. It’s not qualitatively different from any other helter-skelter run. The arty points you can make about it, eg, that it offers a double perspective — you can participate in the experience and watch others doing so — apply to every funfair"
Tom Lubbock The Independent “

He collides the wild imaginative play of the baroque with the rational, straight-lined classicism of Tate Modern”
Jonathan Jones The Guardian

“Yes, he could have erected his slide in Alton Towers but it wouldn’t have been art there. It would have been a slide. At Tate Modern, an entirely different context, the slides affect a different audience in a different way . . . Slides are generally for children. Not this one. This one is aimed specifically at the child within”
Waldemar Januszczak The Sunday Times

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