Combining Sex Club with Art a Bad Joke?

A version of this article was originally published at Technorati.

This reminds me of the line from "Back to School" with Rodney Dangerfield. "You're wife's just been showing us her Klimt. . . . She's very proud of it." And Rodney says, "I'm proud of mine too. I don't go waving it around at parties, though."

The famed Secession Hall in Vienna plans to bring Rodney's joke to life by staging an exhibition of some of Klimt's masterpieces in conjunction with a mockup of an actual Viennese sex club called "Element 6." The exhibitionistic exhibition is the brainchild of a Swiss artist named Christoph Buechel.

Who said we would never need those SAT analogies in the real world? "Gustav Klimt's 1902 painting "Beethoven Frieze" [pictured] is to Viennese fin de siecle mores, as modern-day sex clubs are to . . .

The answer is (c), modern-day mores. Did you get that one right? Buechel's object lesson (for us C-students) appears to be that Klimt's masterpieces were as shocking in their day as sex clubs are in ours.

Every of-age patron of the museum is treated to mood lighting, low-slung couches and erotic non-masterpieces in route to the collection.

The exhibition ends April 18th.