If you read the NY Times travel section on Sunday you will find out that the new Lens Louvre is more like the Guggenheim Bilbao, so 4 to 5 hours should be enough for the first visit. You can return when they rotate the works.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/10/travel/2013-places-to-go.html#/?place_id=lens

There are no highlights.

Louvre Lens is, in concept, essentially modelled on Tate Liverpool (though sadly the actual building isn't). So it has no permanent collection: just a set of temporary exhibitions and the usual job-creating add ons.

These are all listed on the site (http://www.louvrelens.fr) The exhibitions on at the time you're around may or may not be to your taste, and there really isn't much else worth visiting in Lens (though it's got a good football team and Vimy Ridge is nearby) if they're not. Unless you've got an interest in pointless wastes of public money on faddish palliatives for postindustrial decline.

Assuming you're starting in Paris, there are a few direct TGVs a day taking a bit over an hour - but mostly it's a slow route, changing at Lille, taking two hours each way.

If Liverpool's anything to go by (and looking at the current Lens exhibitions, I'd say Lens is a lot lower-key), there's usually about one or two shows a year that make the trip from the capital worthwhile for even the keenest artlover.

Even then, there are virtually guaranteed to be several temporary exhibitions on in Paris much more worth your time if it's at all limited.

Louvre Lens solves a really important problem: what to do, apart from stuffing the car with even more cheap wine at Cite d'Europe, when you've driven headlong from the Italian border, got to the Pas de Calais with three hours to spare before your Eurotunnel booking and you've seen Amiens and Beauvais cathedrals far too often already.

So personally I'm delighted it's opened. I doubt my joy is that widely shared - except among the immediate beneficiaries of EU taxpayers' involuntary benevolence.