Just about the only touristy thing that Whitney and I had time to do on our trip to New York was visiting the Museum of Modern Art. And you know how I feel about most modern art from last time I went to visit one of those - I had been all ready to mock it mercilessly, not afraid to point out when somebody had just stuck something on the ceiling or covered it in string or filled it with beans. We're funding a large number of people with a colossal amount of money to be equally colossally pretentious about obviously useless things.

But as much as I'd expected it to be dreadful, the building itself, at least, was something to talk about. It's designed so that you can see a large amount of people walking around on all floors from a lot of different positions, and looks like what would have happened if Escher had been allowed to design a building in places. Not somewhere you'd want to spend too long because it makes your head hurt after a while, but it's an interesting effect.

We only visited one part of the place, which was themed around light, on free entry on our way somewhere else. To get there you have to walk down a corridor lit in extremely harsh yellow (I tried using my sunglasses, but they were unable to stop the onslaught). Once you've got to the end everything else things are normally lit in white, but because you've spent so long in it things look purple instead.

After that, once you've regained your vision, you veer off to the right into an entirely blank white room with one wall covered in light moss. This is exactly the kind of thing that I was talking about above - why? What's it's reason for existing? You may answer that that's the exact reaction that the "artist" wanted to provoke, but I'm tempted to further conclude that the answer from his point of view is "So I can be paid an obscene amount of money for hanging a sheet up with some moss on it".

Similarly, there was a room with one of those epileptic fit-inducing strobe lights flashing on some drops of water descending from the ceiling. And opposite that, a light bulb with a slowly rotating mirror in front of it that caused the effect of the shadow being cast gradually over the entire wall and then receding again. Again, I can't say that I saw a point to it, but it must have taken a while to set up.

Further on, a set of lights were set up on posts in a smoke-filled room to create a cube made out of beams of light. I actually quite liked this, just for the weird ghostliness of its appearance. And continuing the geometrical theme was a giant cylinder that you stand inside while it cycles gradually through colours from harsh red to soothing green to Windows XP panic blue.

The highlight, though, came when we walked out of that exhibition to find a piece of rope suspended from the ceiling about two storeys above, with a desk fan tied to it spinning the whole arrangement around like a manic pendulum a foot or so above people's heads (or two feet above mine). It looked like the kind of thing that the people I lived with in university would think up after coming home drunk from the Union one night. Maybe that's where all the better modern artists get their ideas - even if it's ultimately pointless at least it's mildly entertaining.