Yes, but is it art?

Reykjavík is having a few weeks of exciting contemporary artists setting up mobile exhibitions in strange places all over the city. The exhibition I went to yesterday was mostly concerned with the slightly naïve appropriation of political imagery in order to show videos of an imaginary parallel universe in which Reykjavík was conquered by a band of guerilla fighters, who poisoned the water supply, executed all the children, and masturbated into a gigantic cockroach. I didn't quite follow the last bit. They also hung flags adorned with a diagrammatic representation of a womb all over the main shopping street. Today's exhibition, which involved dry ice, video footage of gypsy fiddlers, and this disturbing doll-face stuffed into a large false intestine,

was a little less offensive but no more comprehensible. I suppose this post should really be signed 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' - why can't we have proper art like in the good old days? You know, oil on canvas, absinthe and people chopping their ears off?