Antwerp's artful rise
Probably not. A bizarre mixture of coarse red sandstone from India, undulating Italian glass and 3,000 hand-shaped metal medallions, MAS is more intriguing than amazing. One drawback is that most of the signage is in Flemish only, although audio guides – yet to arrive when I visited – should address this.
And there is still much to enjoy, not least a glamorous opening exhibition, running until December 30, of masterpieces by Flemish artists, including Rogier van der Weyden, Van Eyck and Brueghel the Elder, that have been plucked from three of Antwerp's best art museums, including the colossal Royal Museum of Fine Arts (closed for a revamp till 2017) and Museum Plantin-Moretus, one of Europe's great printing houses, which was founded in 1576.
A surprise success is the free-entry second floor, where you can wander through backstage storage areas in which some of MAS's 470,000 treasures are kept – a wondrous jumble of draws, cages and art-filled walls where everything from model ships and walking sticks to garden gnomes and masks from the Belgian Congo is now neatly imprisoned.