Susan Buckland: An art crisis in Spain

How often have you stood in a gallery before an abstract art work, the meaning of which escapes you entirely? Given the hefty price tag, you decide it could be seen by the cognoscenti as a demonstration of ignorance to dismiss it as a piece of board at which pots of different-coloured paint have been thrown from a distance of 2m.

Furthermore, you don't want to admit that you can make neither head nor tail of the painting when the curator has just spent 10 minutes explaining the artistic impulses which led to its creation. The situation is compounded by those about you who are nodding in reverent approval while the curator unravels layers of symbolism. It's difficult to tell which people are as baffled as you because they would rather feign appreciation than let the side down.

I probably looked like a stunned mullet as I trailed a guided group in Spain's renowned Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The day before, when I had visited Madrid's Queen Sofia Museum, things had gone better. I had become immersed in many of the famous 20th-century paintings, including Picasso's Guernica, his searing depiction of the saturation bombing of a Basque village by German planes in the civil war. The symbolism was fascinating.

But now I was in Basque country, in Bilbao's acclaimed Guggenheim, having an art-interpretation crisis.

That's when James, an art student from Idaho came to the rescue. He had noticed my internal struggle.

"Are you sceptical about a few of the works in here?" he asked tactfully.

"Don't think me a philistine," James, I told him. "I've seen some remarkable works in the permanent collection."

But take the exhibit of television sets showing pictures of waves while emitting the sound of mating frogs or belching humans. I couldn't decide which. Could James with his knowledge of the art scene explain if there was a neo-expressionistic point to this exhibit that I was missing?

I wasn't alone in failing to grasp art when I saw it, James said in his courteous American way. Indeed, the museum has been criticised by pre-eminent architects and museum designers as a competitive building with superficial contents. Ironically, some of the most scathing criticism has come from modern museum designers who have set out to wow audiences with dazzlingly contemporary architecture.

Not all visitors to Bilbao's Guggenheim may be enraptured by all the exhibits but the building invariably wins them over. Since the gleaming titanium museum opened to a blaze of publicity in 1997 there has been a stream of visitors. Sitting on the Nervion River, the museum looks like a sailing ship from a space-age fairy tale.

Bilbao's willingness to embrace 21st-century architecture persuaded the revered American Guggenheim organisation to lend its name. The daring building with its soaring curves and exterior reflecting the play of Basque country light was designed by avant-garde California-based architect Frank Gehry. Cleverly he has integrated the building into the city - the huge Puente de La Salve Bridge pierces through one end of the museum.

I followed the museum's provocative curves to where Gehry's man-made lake creates the optical illusion of meeting the river. His artistic imagination extends to the museum cafe, where chairs and tables are designed to suggest baskets.

James from Idaho was happy I got the basket symbolism. And later when we had exhausted all 19 of the Guggenheim's galleries, we said goodbye beneath a huge fresh-flower exhibit shaped like a dog. We agreed no interpretation was needed. It was quite simply a knock-out.