But is it art?

So this is the blip I set out to get a few weeks ago, but I managed to wander round every side of the Cité but the right one. Today I found the exact spot where you need to stand to see this work of art in its full, er, glory. See the extras for what it looks like from different positions.

As you can imagine, it has divided opinion -- in fact it got vandalised early on, while it was still being installed. Today a lot of people were taking photos of it, but no-one was expressing opinions, positive or negative. My first thought was the very French "C'est du grand n'importe quoi". It is remarkably clever to figure out exactly where to put the stripes to get the right effect from the key point. But I couldn't decide what the actual point of it was. Not to mention that painting a massive target on a place that suffered a terrorist attack just a few weeks before was hardly tactful -- though of course the work had been planned long before that happened.

We were passing on our way back from S's unbirthday lunch chez Franck Putelat -- as I won't be here on his actual birthday due to bad planning. We hadn't been for four years (it's too expensive to go more often) and compared with last time we were a little bit disappointed. Of course the food was of impeccable quality and beautifully presented, but it seemed less imaginative and had veered a bit too far towards style over substance. Still, we were the only customers to get a handshake and a word from the man himself after the meal (probably because we were the last people left in the restaurant when he emerged from the kitchen).

And this evening, a three-hour choir committee meeting at which we ended up stuffing ourselves with cake and cider to recover from the shock of calculating how much next year's project is going to cost. Back to the drawing board ...