I love a bit of art, a nice pik-cher, a paintin’, maybe a skulp-cha, just love it.

Yet I managed to avoid all of Vienna’s almost countless galleries until our 11th ‘hour’, immediately prior to take-off, before giving in and actually entering an art museum. The one in the picture. Aptly named: The Museum for Modern Kun- well, whatever, you can speak German as well as I can (I sincerely hope). All the museums are wonderful buildings, in fact spectacular. But going inside?

This Museum of Modern Art, momak, had and exhibition of modernism. Ahhhh, modernism. Great. So we paid our Euros and in we went, into that building that was so splendid it was made of volcanic lava and looked like a massive, black shoe-box.

Modernism started in the late 1800s and there was Picasso and Maigritte and numerous other luminaries of the art world, some impressionists, some cubists, a few surrealists, dadaists and all was well and dandy. Until Modernism decided that it was ‘modern’ in repsonse to the changes in the world, led by Darwin and Freud, and thus became a philosophy rather than a mere art-form, and this opened up the doors to all kinds of ‘installations’, concepts, and general ‘stuff’ that was so revolutionary, so different, so ‘fucking out-there’ that it would not immediately be considered, by the moronic masses, as ‘art’.

Piles of metal, a couple of mirrors, some cardboard boxes, three tv screens showing disconnected images over and over again. This all became ‘modernist art’ and is really good. No, it is, really good art. Apparently.

Call me a philistine if you will, but an entire wall covered in pages with random numbers printed on them is not something you would want to look at in a museum. In an accountant’s office maybe, but not an art gallery.

Yet the exhibition made it much easier to leave Vienna and fly home. Arriving back at Heathrow just in time to hear the last 15 minutes of the Chelsea game on the radio coming home. European Cup quarter-final. And Chelsea did what was required. Paris St Germain are gone, Spurs never started, Viennese play football but in powdered wigs and long red coats whilst holding violins, and Chelsea are through. The Morinho effect.

Art is life. And life is football. It all comes around. Which was why my main thoughts whilst wondering round the momak were of Spurs beating Sunderland 5-1, Arsenal losing 3-0 at Everton and how different things have different meanings to different people.

Have a very post-modernist Wednesday

A xxxx