Mr Gorbachev - tear down this painting!

Exhibit B is from Berlin. If the Paris picture planted the seed of an idea last year, this is the picture that, this February, crystallised it and made me decide to create the site. I spent an unhappy week at a conference in the south-eastern suburbs, near Tempelhof airport and the old Berlin Wall. The Estrel Centre is a grey and utterly charmless concrete edifice, with jobsworth staff and rooms so minimalist that they seem to have sprung fully formed from an Ikea catalogue, like that bit at the start of Fight Club where Edward Norton is reflecting on how his life is a worthless exercise in conformist consumerism. Being central Europe, all art seems to be Modernist, and the pictures on the wall of the hotel are no exception. My room had this:

Lovely, isn't it? The child's drawing of a bus, moon, brain/labyrinth/stop sign and giant pair of Marilyn Monroe lips are presumably trying to send some kind of message about Berlin - night life, public transport, women - we have it all! It is all lovingly rendered in wax crayon squiggles overlaid with a colour wash, like you used to do at junior school. Top marks for keeping inside the lines, though, meister.

Not only signed this time, but dated. 'Pisak '95'.  Perhaps Herr/Frau Pisak was infused by the optimistic spirit of the 90s, after the fall of the Wall, when everything seemed possible - even getting paid for a child's picture of a bus in crayon.