Of course the main tourist reason for going to Bilbao is the famous Guggenheim museum, which rates right up there with all the other over-rated rip-offs of tourism.

"It looks like a ship...", yes and so do ships; your point being?

The art inside is so pretentious as to be beyond pretention.  Great slabs of rusty steel "containing space".  Serra claims to be redefining sculpture; I think he is taking the piss. 

To be fair, the Guggenheim has fulfilled its primary purpose as a cultural catalyst in the regeneration of the former shipyards, to the extent that the "Guggenheim effect" has a phenomenon named after it and I do rather like the groovy shape and shiny cladding.  I suspect that my principle reason for an initially jaundiced reaction was their paranoid prohibition on photography of the equally groovy internal spaces.

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