"I know it probably has some other meaning," said 20-year-old history and Spanish major Laura Sayler. "When I think of it, I don't think of that other meaning. I just think of, like, hair."

Admiration:

"I'm amazed by it," said Sandra Michael, a visitor from New York who went to the exhibit looking for the coarse locks of African-American hair but couldn't pick them out. "It shows me that there is no difference because I can't see it. ... Someone who can create something like this, to think of something like this and then to create it, it's phenomenal."

And contempt:

"Absolutely lacking in aesthetics. What ... pretentious junk. The artist and the commissioner ought to be ashamed. So many flaws."

Zak Moore, a columnist for Dartmouth's student newspaper, worried that the "somewhat gross and unattractive" show might turn away prospective students.

"When I find a piece of disconnected hair on or near my food or person, I am disgusted. ... Now we are surrounding ourselves with the same gross substance? And while we are trying to study no less!" he wrote.

He said the millions of dollars he heard Dartmouth had paid for the works made him want to tear his own hair out.

Kennedy said Gu was paid a fraction of the rumored millions, "a six-figure sum starting with a one."

Viewers who move past any initial disgust will be rewarded, Kennedy said.

"It's the transformative possibility of the hair that (Gu's) exploring," he said. "It's transformed into a translucent screen, which defies its material."

Gu's second installation is a braid of roughly 7 1/2 miles of hair purchased from wig factories in China and India. Rising from a spaghettilike mass and hanging in long loops on both sides of the library's central corridor, it elicits a generally positive reaction.

"I think the braid is more interesting," said Sayler, the student. "It also, like, reminds me more of what I think the artist is getting at and less of just, like, 'eeww."'

Stainless steel medallions attached to sections of braid dyed in electric colors bear the names of 207 countries. Written backward, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, leaving viewers to puzzle over the letters (Finland becomes "dnalnif," Lebanon "nonabel") and smile at the decoding.

The piece's playful tone is catching.