Not falling for it

Finally made it to MASP, the famous red-and-grey concrete box on stilts in central Sao Paulo. As with museums in general, and Sao Paulo museums in particular, I went reluctantly, more interested in getting to the big fat Bovinus buffet afterwards, located a brisk walk away down Avenida Paulista.

As I've noted before, Sao Paulo museums that I've seen tend to be shockingly badly curated: unimaginative, sparse and well, just plain tedious. Exceptions would include the slightly more charming Pinacotteca (although maybe that's just the building itself ?) and the Bank of Brazil building where we saw an Escher exhibition recently.

Why the dearth of decent museums ? I think it's down to a self-selecting cognoscenti elite, out of touch with the modern world. The silver lining is that these museums are easy to "do" since there is so little to see or catch your attention. We had one hour to conquer MASP before closing time and that turned out to be more than enough, maybe twice as much time as we needed.

The big "installation" on the ground or lower ground floor was yet another cliched piece of "video art". Row upon row of talking heads, the usual Benetton collection of little people - just like you and me ! - from around the world, bla bla-ing in response to the usual over-generalised questions about life. In my book that is called market research and should be condensed into a nice, clear conclusion along with a few headline statistics and pie charts. Watching Mr and Mrs Joe Public in super-close-up tells us nothing profound about human nature and is not "art". If you want to be quickly bored by people standing on their personal soap box, you don't need to go to a museum, just read a blog like this.

Much more interesting was a short chat with one of the attendants (which you might call "interactive art"). Pri was about to change Sam's nappy without realising there was a disconcertingly large gap where the back of the hideous concrete bench should have been, and through the gap was an even more disconcertingly large drop to the concrete floor below. The attendant hurried over to prevent any untoward baby acrobatics and Pri was grateful for the intervention. I feared this bench was another Niemeyer horror but in fact it was by a woman architect of Italian origin.

She had intended it for people to sit on, facing over the edge with their legs hanging down, but this had been deemed too dangerous so is not allowed. But why didn't they put some kind of safety fence behind the large gap, I asked ? Because it's a listed building, he said, or whatever the equivalent phrase is here. Have there been accidents, I asked ? No, he replied, but partly because he was good at running over and stopping kids from plunging to their deaths. I would call his quietly heroic actions a form of performance art and the museum's lack of safety fencing a kind of "negligence art".

The rest of the museum contained the usual big name old masters, impressionists, Van Gogh and so on plus the usual dreadful religious-themed old paintings, guaranteed to make my legs buckle with fatigue. There were a few more modern pieces too. The real pleasure was in getting out of there and being able to tick it off the list of things you feel you have to see before leaving the city of Sao Paulo.