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One-Minute Paris: Advertising defaces some of Paris’s most famous monuments, including the Conciergerie and the Louvre. Click here to view on larger screen. |
Tourists cruising the Seine on bateaux mouches these days are taking home some unusual snapshots of Paris. Instead of the Conciergerie, the last home of Marie-Antoinette and famous for its pointy medieval towers, they have an ad for the iPad2. Instead of the Musée d’Orsay, home to the world’s finest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, L’Oréal. Instead of the Louvre, the most-visited art museum in the world, a gigantic Breguet watch. Renovation work has given the national government, which owns these monuments, an excuse to sell advertising space on the facades some of the most precious real estate in the world, much to the chagrin of the City of Paris, which has always struggled with the state to be top chien in the capital city. It is a shocking sight to cruise along the Seine and see these icons of Paris defaced by gigantic ads. Surprising that the brigades of anti-advertising guerillas who used to deface the ads defacing Paris haven’t taken a stand. Heidi Ellison
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