Going to the Guggenheim

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The only reason to ever go to Bilbao is to see the Guggenheim, a truly jaw-dropping building that houses a modern art museum. The contents inside are hit or miss, but still interesting enough to spend half a day looking at it. There really isn’t anything else to do in Bilbao anyway except experience the various ultra modern systems of public transportation. This city has one of the most modern subways in the world, which looks a hell of lot like D.C. Metro, a tram that basically functions as a tourist mover, and funicular to get you up the hill. It is all complete overkill. This city isn’t that big, certainly not to have this kind of transportation system. But it was quite nice for me when I needed to get across town with a huge backpack and couldn’t be bothered to figure out the buses routes and was too cheap to take a cab.

But back to the main point of interest, the museum. It was designed by Frank Gehry, who says fish that his mom would occasionally bring home and keep in the bathtub until dinner time inspired him. The outside is paneled with thin rectangles of platinum that do look very much like fish scales. The curves of the building invoke images of waves or even flames versus a wriggling fish. Since I first saw images of the building, I wanted to run my
hand along it to see if it was as smooth as it looks. Luckily you can get right next to the building so I got to fulfill that wish.

The inside of the building is an exhibit on its own. Sadly you can’t take pictures but I did take one surreptitiously. There are no straight lines but curves and waves everywhere you look. The largest gallery is called the fishbone and houses a huge walk through exhibit of iron spirals and halls built with the gallery in mind. I scoffed at first but after walking through the exhibit, I was interested in taking down the artist’s name to look for other works. My scoffing attitude continued through a few other galleries and proved to be right. One German woman painted about 100 numbers each on thousands of sheets of paper that were hung in a medium size gallery. A viewer would find no obvious rhyme or reason to the numbers painted and on further inquiry I learned that there was none. The artist chose to paint these numbers because it is a “form of writing without descriptive content.” I think that line sums up why I have such a love/hate relationship with modern art. Of course, I couldn’t say where you draw the line between art and junk and doubt anyone could, so the world will always be saddled with work that is consider crap by 99% of the viewers. Sometimes I think the curators are just bored and playing a joke on the patrons of the museum.

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