Art for art's sake. Witness aesthetics clubbed into dank submission and left to die a slow, painful death as it drags itself through the mud of modernism to sink into the ultimate tarpit of whatever the basement holds. Welcome to get irretrievably lost in the corridors of the twentieth century, not unlike the Apollo 11 moon landing tapes, soviet credibility, or the concept of having fresh milk delivered to your house on a daily basis. Museum Ludwig houses two hundred and sixty thousand cubic metres of air for you to breathe, contained within walls painstakingly decorated to evoke the feeling of being trapped in every waiting room you've ever visited, simultaneously. It's the kind of art where the real art does not lie in what's to be seen, but in convincing the world that what you're looking at is, in fact, priceless. Each piece begs you to marvel at the sheer audacity of it all and even before you arrive at the first Jackson Pollock, the words: “You could have done that,” ring out like a mantra in your mind. And it's true. You could have – but you didn't. You could have been extraordinary, but then you hit adulthood like a spacebar and ended up being extra ordinary instead. Tears of unfulfilled potential well in your eyes and you reach out towards the canvas in this moment of reckoning, in an unconscious attempt to go back in time, to somehow, impossibly, reconnect with your hopes and dreams – only to set off an alarm. “Nicht anfassen,” hisses the guardian of abstract expressionism, delivering the words with a trembling urgency suggesting you're that one stupid character in a horror movie who's about to get everyone killed. Thus humiliated by an unpaid intern collaborating with a long-dead millionaire con man, you descend into the subterranean underbelly of the building. A place where contemporary art hides in shame or cunning, the exhibition as a whole eerily reminiscent of your hoarder neighbour's basement. Both shelter the physical evidence of a deeply troubled psyche, both inexplicably smell of molasses, both provoke thought. Mostly: “What the [redacted] were they thinking?” The artworks themselves appear equally confused and, for lack of a more satisfactory expression, ugly as all hell. Ugly, not by conscious choice, but as the result of a desperate lack of skill drowned in an overdose of pretension. Come and see a rescue blanket. Lying on the floor. Lying on the floor like an inanimate object, its metallic sheen a silent scream against the indifferent cube of the gallery. You paid money to be here. Are you out of touch? Is it everybody else who's gone mad? Or are you caught up, perchance, in a satire played so straight-faced you’re liable to mistake it for sincerity? Viewed from whatever angle, Museum Ludwig remains a cultural Rorschach test. And for those who fail to find any meaning, they may still find salvation in the arms of the inevitable souvenir shop.