"Marsyas" is a sculpture by Anish Kapoor which has filmed the huge Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. It is possibly the world's biggest indoor sculpture.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 11 October 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, it's a huge art work. Does it make an equivalent impact?

GERMAINE GREER:
First of all, I was just smiling slightly; trust Anish to be pretentious while apparently being unpretentious.

I love the way it is the apotheosis of modern technology, because the idea is developed by computer technology, and then it's deconstructed and put back together again.

Each little seam to me was with great delight because they are done with tiny welds all along. It's like an extraordinary explosion of some sort of incredible cosmic needlework.

I love all that aspect of these soft sculptures of his. They are totally compelling. But compared to his previous work: Tarantantara, that he did at Gateshead, this doesn't work.

That's terrible for me to say, because I love the idea that it's a hole instead of a projection. Here is one that's not phallic. It's also the colour of drying, dark Venus blood.

The curious thing is it has to be site-specific. It's in a fantastic space and it fights with it. It reduces it to a garage..

MARK LAWSON:
But he would say that the trick is to fill a space as large as that..

GERMAINE GREER:
He jostles.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
He tends to talk in his work about how in fact, by filling a space, you emphasise the emptiness of it by blurring the differences between illusion and reality.

I think that's something. I find this an amazing piece of work.

I think it's strange that he actually has been very specific about calling it the Flaying of Marsyas, because for me it's much more subject to interpretation, like his other work. He always tries to be very open with his work.

MARK LAWSON:
Apparently, he got the title at the end, so it could mean anything.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
It was almost like a giant worm hole to me. I find his work relevant because it reminds me of lots of modern ideas in physics.

It feels like his work, like a lot of great artists, really captures what's going on in modern science. He does that in a very abstract way, so I always find his work really compelling.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I thought it was the Emperor's new clothes. I thought he had this commission and came up with this weird thing. All one can think of is it's very big and it doesn't really look like anything.

When you go in Tate Modern and you can look at one part of the sculpture and you have Rodin's 'The Kiss' in front of you and you can look through it. Call me old-fashioned, but that's a sculpture which moved me.

It seemed this was a thing that pleases Unilever, the sponsor, and everybody says, "Wow, it's great."

GERMAINE GREER:
It doesn't have to be about anything. That's the first thing.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
I agree.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
But it doesn't do anything to you. It didn't do anything to me.

GERMAINE GREER:
It was extraordinary but what I have to say at this point is that I don't understand it.

Where it becomes very thin and it seems quite tiny compared to the extraordinary bells, I was sort of nervous about that because it seemed out of scale suddenly, and the whole thing lost its massiveness.

I also felt really uncomfortable under the big horizontal bell pressing into the ground.