About 100 years ago, Pablo Picasso set off to the Musée du Trocadéro in Paris to study some plaster casts of Romanesque sculpture. Legend has it that, once inside the museum, he took a wrong turn. He ended up in a room of African masks. Picasso’s false move changed the way he looked at the world. He went back to his studio and made some changes to a painting he had been working on.

It was a group portrait of five prostitutes, looking defiantly at the viewer. Picasso changed three of the women’s faces into something that resembled the masks he had just seen. And with those few brush strokes, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” upset the course of 20th-century art. It was painting’s “African moment”, when artists turned their back on the academic strictures and barren themes of western art history, and re-found the energy and simplicity that had been lost over the centuries.

In the changed world of the 21st century, that story already sounds ridiculous. Globalisation has shrunk the cultural and business worlds, while the rapid dissemination of material unleashed by new technologies means there are no wrong turnings any more, just the frenetic and relentless criss-crossings of more and more information superhighways.