Recap: Caution: Art Afoot, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the New York Times, As contemporary art often does, the giant crack in the floor at the Tate Modern here inspires different responses from different people.

Some might agree with the Tate that the work, Doris Salcedo’s “Shibboleth,” concerns “the divisions between creed, color, class and culture that maintain our social order, precariously balanced as it is on the precipice of a chaotic void of hatred.” Others might feel that, as a visitor named Peter Lord said the other day, “there’s some kind of meaning behind it, although I don’t know what.”

And then there are those who trip on the crack and hurt themselves. The Times of London reported that 15 people suffered minor injuries in the first eight weeks after “Shibboleth” opened in October in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern’s vast signature space. The newspaper cited museum records it obtained in a search under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act. The work will be on view until April 6.

The newspaper’s revelation gave the exhibit a certain degree of notoriety: What was this dangerous work of art? But when they see it for themselves, members of the gallery-going public tend to have two responses. First, they are relieved that the Tate has resisted the British trend toward removing the risk from even mundane pursuits. Second, they are astonished that anyone could encounter risk in “Shibboleth” in the first place.

“How dim would you have to be?” Mark Knight, a 41-year-old nurse from Ipswich, asked rhetorically the other day.

“‘Oh, no, I wasn’t expecting the crack to be there,”’ Mr. Knight whined, imagining the inner monologue of an injured party. “‘There’s a crack there, but hey, when I put my foot in there, I didn’t expect to trip in it.’” The installation is some 500 feet long and, at its widest point, less than a foot across. It looks like an earthquake’s jagged fault line or a fissure brought on by prolonged drought. The museum has been coy about how Ms. Salcedo, a celebrated Colombian artist, actually did the work, but it has revealed that it involved opening up the Turbine Hall floor “in order to create a cavity.”

“Shibboleth” takes its title from the Old Testament story in which the ability to pronounce the word was used by the victorious Gileadites as a test to identify members of the tribe of Ephraim who were trying to sneak back into their home territory. Those who couldn’t say it correctly were revealed as Ephraimites and killed.

The work is the eighth in the popular Unilever Series on the Tate’s enormous ground floor. It is not the first to raise safety concerns: the previous installation, which involved huge tubes that people slid through, was said to have needed extra cushioning after some members of the opening-night crowd were catapulted too precipitously onto the floor.

In a statement the gallery said that “there have been 10 reported incidents in the Turbine Hall” since “Shibboleth” opened. It added that more than 870,000 people had visited the work, and that none had been badly hurt.

“We take issues of health and safety very seriously,” the gallery said.