OK, it just got more interesting. I’m not exactly sure why, but it does. That I’d like to see.
Breaking it down (which isn’t always a great idea for art phenomena), I think what was happening is:
[ul]
[li]It’s a huge, bright, unexpected object in a fairly natural-looking setting (OK, it’s an artificially landscaped park, but the other objects in view are trees, water, people)[/li][li]The colours used are at opposite ends of the spectrum - it’s hard for the eye to focus properly on blue and red things both at the same time[/li][li]You can’t get really close to it on land - you can circle around it along the lake edge - and where you’re looking at it across featureless water, it’s hard to get any scale context - I felt like I was at times grasping to understand whether it was big and far away, or smaller and closer.[/li][li]It doesn’t seem to cast as much of a reflection as you might expect it to. I don’t know if the surface of the Serpentine is ever flat calm - it wasn’t when I visited, and it isn’t in any of the photos I have seen. Lack of reflection makes the object look implausible.[/li][/ul]
I don’t know how much of that was the intent of the artist - he seems a pretty clever guy though, so it wouldn’t surprise me to learn this is what he wanted.