What a glorious day. How magnificent is Guggenheim Bilbao? Utterly magnificent. I would put it on the list of places to see on sunny days but I'd enter by the main entrance and be totally overwhelmed by the Richard Serra installation because it's immense.
It arrests the thinking process, takes you somewhere, makes you feel, really feel. What it makes you feel I have no idea but follow his steelwork with your shoulder and watch the shapes unfold above you, feel the constraint, experience the space he creates, observe the constantly changing light around you, wonder at how he did it and enjoy the awareness of shape, especially intersecting cones, torus sections, concave and convex intersections. Stroll in ever decreasing circles, spirals and finally with straight edges delineating a directional change get to the innermost edge and lean against the cold steel in awe and have your thoughts blown away as a studio flash mounted on the ceiling adjacent to a camera make itself known.
Get told off by a uniformed lady in Spanish explaining that the camera with a cross through it prominently displayed meant no photos. Ooooops. Sorry, but I honestly hadn't seen that one. Well done Canon for having a silent mode.
All this and you haven't started yet. On the way in the walk around the building is an experience in its own right, the bridge even has a lift to ensure that you are not too tired as you approach. Every aspect has been thought out. Outside, The Puppy makes you smile, the smoke tells you the time and the titanium, glass, steel and limestone put you in your place. These things last. You don't, not as you are, anyway.
An utterly fabulous experience.
The top floor has a Yoko Ono exhibition. Now, if "art" is meant to arrest you, do something to you or for you, amuse, inform, enquire, inquire, smile, grimace, laugh, cry, feel something. Something good, something bad, whatever but something. Yoko Ono's does nothing. It is dross. Froth. I'm no art critic, I don't know much about it but I have been privileged to stand before some fantastic stuff, ancient and modern, some I've liked, some I've truly disliked, some I've loved, some has left me stunned and amazed and glad to be alive and some hasn't but her's left me empty, not wanting to engage with it, not caring about it, not wishing to share it with anyone. I may not know art but I do know about The Emperor's new clothes. This is like that. It is froth. A vain statement that she exists and has conned a curator to give space to cups, saucers and a teapot. A wall of framed drawings that I wouldn't hang anywhere that light could fall on them, a row of indistinct but recognisably similar photos each with a different title. Even her "magnetic" dining room is puerile, some of her other exhibits are just porn.
As for having her records displayed without her late husband's made me realise that without him she'd be nowhere. And a complete nobody that none of us had ever heard of, let alone admitted to this level of exposure.
This is the saddest art exhibition I have ever seen, it is an ego trip, sanctioned by some admirer who would have been in the crowd applauding The Emperor as he passed by.
If I'd climbed the stairs to see it I'd have considered that the energy I'd used in getting there was far more valuable than the sum total of what she's put on display.
Go to Guggenheim Bilbao. Wait till after the 18th May. See what else they can find to put there. Anything would be infinitely preferable. Even the empty space would say more than she has.
Her husband would have seen The Emperor's new clothes for what they were, he had talent enough to recognise pretensiousness and probably would have spared us all from that which fills floor three.
Jeremy Clarkson once said that art was what they put in art galleries.
He was wrong.
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