Costing almost as much as the UK's Millennium Dome (and not without its own attendant controversies over timing, content and finance), the [pounds sterling]600 million Expo ambitiously encompasses five cantons, three lakes, two languages, four towns (Yverdon-les-Bains, Neuchatel, Bienne and Morat) and 8000 staff plus a glossy posse of foreign architects.

By far the longest and most thoughtful case study concerns the Eighth Swiss Sculpture Exhibition held in Bienne in 1980, an exhibition at which almost half of the works presented in the open air ended up being trashed by anonymous members of the public: mobiles hurled to the ground, works covered with graffiti or treated as waste receptacles, or - in one instance - removed by a gardener who claimed in court not to have recognized the object in question as art.

Lying at the eastern end of the Bieler See, at the point where French-speaking west Switzerland meets the German-speaking north-east, Bienne is the largest town involved in Expo and has the largest arteplage.