Millions of tourists who travel to Paris visit the Louvre, arguably the world's greatest art museum since it houses the Mona Lisa, generally considered the world's greatest piece of art on canvas.
The Mona Lisa is covered in special glass and tourists are kept at a distance. However, those same tourists got a little too close to a temporary art installation on Saturday and ended up destroying it-just hours after it was completed.
The visitors grabbed and pulled away 2,000 strips of paper after some of it started to come unglued anyway, rendering the installation by French street artist Jean Rene nothing more than, well, litter in the courtyard of the famed museum.
Rene, who is often compared to British street and graffiti artist Banksy, was commissioned by the Louvre to create a piece to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the pyramid, the outdoor structure that serves as the main entrance to the museum.
The artist came up with a brilliant, fascinating idea of a biodegradable illusion in which it appeared the pyramid itself was suddenly rising out of a ravine.
It took Rene and 400 volunteers four days to glue the thousands of pieces of paper together to arrange the illusion.
It was completed Friday night, and it barely made it to Saturday.
As part of the artwork started to disintegrate, curious tourists and visitors did the rest, pulling at the paper strips and, in many cases, just walking over them.
"It's perfectly normal for it to be degradable. We just didn't know how fast it would happen," a spokesperson for the Louvre said.
For his part, the artist seemed non-plussed by the short life span of his creation.
"The images, like life, are ephemeral," he said on his website. "Once pasted, the art piece lives on its own. The sun dries the light glue and with every step, people tear pieces of fragile paper."
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