The latest crop of art graduate shows is about to open: here’s what to expect

Carsten Höller launched his new participation exhibition in London this week, and its dream-like experimental art sequences will likely dazzle and irritate spectators. Decision is a show about giant dice, raining pills and mental distress, where the decisions themselves play only a supporting role to the unabashed whimsy. This is not to deconstruct the essential value of supplying oversized magic mushroom mobiles to the adult populace: there should be one in every city. But the show does revive the propagation of modern-art cliché pieces conveniently in time for this weekend’s NCAD graduate exhibition launch.

The annual degree shows from the various art colleges have a valuable function, but they also have a few perennial features. Here’s what to look out for while stroking your beard.

Expect an abundance of wrecked furniture and psychedelic homages. Abandoned mattresses have had a permanent residency in Tate since Tracy Emin granted them cosmopolitan status, so much so that gallery curators now use the collective noun a pride of beds.

Dissociated doll parts and artfully dispersed cigarette butts are an exhibition staple, but don’t try these at home unless you have had some basic training in retrospective semiotics.

In textiles, direct commentary on gender roles will be represented by the greater themes of 1980s glam and disco pants. Throughout all schools, deliberately unfinished pieces provide an investigative analysis of heavy gargling, but they are not to be confused with finished works, such as spot-lit blank canvasses or vacant spaces.