I don't know much about art... and that's it.

Still ranting at anyone within audible range about PETA and the Sea Kittens (which is not a crappy kids-show pop band, though it sounds like it) - they also tried to lobby America's biggest ice-cream producer to switch from cow's milk to breast milk (meaning to fill one of the four icecream storage tanks which holds a days production at their main factory, they'd need over 53000 lactating women to produce enough milk). I don't have a problem with vegetarianism. Don't agree with it, but I'm not going to object to it. I don't even have a problem with veganism, if that's your choice, and you don't try and impose it on me. I do have a problem, however, with the wilful use of absolute bollocks in the pursuit of pushing absolute bullshit agendas. As such, I hereafter choose to treat PETA with the complete lack of respect they have shown for the intelligence of any of us.

Anyhoo. Bit of a stink at EU HQ in Brussels. Brussels is a pretty stinky city as it is, being Belgian, and hence whiffing strongly of dog piddle. However this particular stink surrounds a modern art 'installation' (which was something I thought happened to dishwashers and air-conditioners) commissioned by the Czech Republic as rotating president of the EU. Rotating presidents are not new, Dubya's been going around in circles trying to sniff his own arse for years, at least until he got little Johnny to do it for him. The Czechs handed the job to their number one art impresario, one Dangerous Dave Cerny, with the impression he'd subcontract out bits to artist from the 27 member states so as to get contributions spanning the breadth of the EU. Instead Dangerous Dave knocked the thing up in his shed with two mates who'd come over to watch the Champions League footy over a couple of Pilsner Urquells.

Now I should mention at this juncture that I don't really... get... art. I mean, I understand painting. Paint something. If it looks a bit like what you wanted to paint, winner winner chicken dinner. If it looks not-a-fuck like what you wanted to paint, it's impressionist. But modern art... contemporary art... Let's go back, back, back in time. Fifteen or sixteen years. Our year 10 science/history excursion to Sydney and Canberra, late 1993. The charts were full of Ace of Base, Gabrielle and Soul Asylum. The YHA we were staying at was full of fleas, and the sauna was full of naked German men who the Captain was happy to chat to for extended lengths of time. For our sins (though not for the Captain's) we were sent to the Museum of Contemporary Art for the afternoon. I don't think they imagined we'd just wander around the place pissing ourselves laughing for three hours.

Five identical blank canvases, numbered one through five?

Half a plaster foot and a deflated balloon?

Forty-seven jam jars each with a crumpled snotty tissue stuffed into them?

Of course, none of this running-around-giggling-like-eejits was ever going to get us laid with the more serious arty types amongst the girlie contingent on tour, but if you'd seen some of the heads involved in our posse, you'd understand that it probably wasn't our lack of incisive badinage re the artist's challenging use of texture and shade that was rate-limiting in that equation.

Point being, I don't know much about art, but I know what makes me laugh. And Dangerous Dave Cerny made me laugh like a busted arse. Setting aside the audacity of pretending to be 27 people at once (to the point where the Czechs only found out the afternoon of the unveiling that it was down to him and his drinking bros), there's the actual work itself: Entropa. A gigantic Airfix model kit of Europe. Italy is a football pitch. Germany is reduced to a network of motorways criss-crossing each other in a shape that is most certainly not anything like a Swastika. France is on strike. Bulgaria is a toilet. Denmark is a Lego sculpture. Romania is a Dracula theme park. And fittingly, the UK, most Euroskeptic of all EU nations, isn't there at all. Yeah, it's just a bunch of cheap, tawdry national stereotypes, but it's all in the execution. Which is what they probably would have done with Dangerous Dave back in the Soviet days. Instead, the question on the lips of EU officials and art commentators alike is as timeless as it is subjective: is it art?

Well, yeah, it's art. It's also fraud. Something about Dangerous Dave (allegedly) trousering three hundred and fifty thousand Euros which was meant to find its way to the other participating national artists in his collective. Which Dangerous will probably claim is part of the installation itself as a commentary on the inherent graft and bureaucratic incompetence of EU governance, along with the way his work 'lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space'.

Uh, yeah. Probably just as well I married a science chick rather than an arts one. The conversation hurts my head less.

The Doctor is OUT.