"Complex Shit", a sculpture by the American artist Paul McCarthy, cast loose its moorings and was lifted by a sudden gust of wind from the Paul Klee centre in Berne and carried 200 yards to eventually make landfall in the grounds of a children's home.

Museum authorities said the work had an automatic safety device that was supposed to make it deflate in the event of a storm - but it failed to operate.

The museum's director Juri Steiner said Mr McCarthy had not yet been informed of the fate of his artwork, and that he had not yet decided whether to reinstall it in the centre's garden.

The sculpture was featured in an exhibition called "East of Eden. A Garden Show".

The Paul Klee centre's website described the show as containing "interweaving, diverse, not to say conflictive emphases and a broad spectrum of items to form a dynamic exchange of parallel and self-eclipsing spatial and temporal zones."

In other words, so far as the harsher critics of modern art might be concerned: what happens when la merde hits le ventilateur.