Why do you need naked women and sex to sell art in the West?

There are many reasons for us to admire edgy, brave and path breaking art. Personally, I admire art which also has strong aesthetics, while it provokes and makes us more aware of the world we live in. Complacent and just representative art is just plain boring... If nothing else, more than ever before, art should make a strong statement.

The most recent comes from celebrated artist Anish Kapoor who was invited to install his "provocative" pieces at the Palace of Versailles, in France. He has placed his piece de resistance, a giant vagina, surrounded by broken stones, in the centre of the Palace's historical, carefully planned garden. Calling the installation "Dirty Corner", he wanted to "invite chaos" into the garden, by also introducing ditches and a bottomless whirlpool as well as distorting mirrors. But sexual symbolism abounds.

Is this then a Western obsession, and does the depiction of genitalia still have the power to shock us? Depends where you place it, perhaps? I can think of at least one hundred places where a sculpted humongous vagina or a penis would startle and horrify... But would it be art? And does it, as is being claimed, remind us of France's troubled past?

When many years ago, Auguste Rodin created "The Thinker", it was "shocking"; similarly Western society struggled for a long time with images of Toulose-Lautrec's "fallen" women. There are far too many similar examples. But while this art was unacceptable for that period, it had a deep aesthetic which has survived the intervening decades. Of course in India we were far more easy with nudity, and our amazing temple sculpture is testimony to the fact that we did not find nakedness or depiction of sexuality shocking. It was part of our lives, and the artists and sculptors who created these works were extremely talented and versatile, though nameless. It is not till India began to see itself through the eyes of foreign rulers, that these images became "shocking".

Can it be that Indian artists abroad are also following the paradigm to startle and infuriate? The image of women undressed can no longer provoke outrage, and art, in order to attract attention in the West, must create controversy... (The more the better). Most of us have been fans of Anish Kapoor. As he has depicted his tunnels, and wombs and vaginas and blood and phalluses for a while, (we saw his cannon shooting blood red wax etc in Delhi as well). He has continued to create installation art which is often puzzling, usually metallic and almost always in recent times, sexual. Why not? Others do it as well. Another well known Indian artist literally "exhibited" himself a few years so in London by plastering a wall with imprints of what looked like peculiarly shaped butterflies, but turned out to be "impressions" of his penis... And er, other "private parts".

So the recent, "controversial," "sensational" and "shocking" (I am running out of adjectives here) installation by Anish Kapoor at the Palace of Versailles of a giant vagina comes as no surprise. Again, it is something which one could have expected from him, but the scale and size of it is rather dumbfounding. He has said that the vagina represented the "Queen", in search of power.

Who? Marie Antoinette?

Within the Palace, he once again has a cannon blowing blood red bits of wax around. Of course, given France's bloody history, it is symbolism at its peak. The installations have certainly grabbed attention, and started a fresh debate which might bring more visitors in. Equally, some protests have been lodged. But perhaps if, as one of the critics ecstatically put it, it reminds us of all the vaginas that made up French history and art, why are we taken aback? He has called it the "vagina dialogues". That's one way of looking at it.

It is almost sacrilegious to say anything critical about Kapoor. All one can say, cautiously, is that this giant vagina is probably not the most aesthetic sculpture at the Palace of Versailles. But it is fast becoming the most controversial.