Chanson bleu

Would it help to think of it as graffiti?

“We have a town that’s rather lugubrious, grim and we wanted to brighten it up,” [Mayor Fabien Engleman] told the AFP news agency. “We painted the bottom swimming-pool blue and the rest turquoise. It wasn’t at all to harm the fountain.”

Of which the mayor also said, 'It's a struggle to call it art.'

Unsurprisingly, [artist Alain] Mila disagrees.

So Mila is suing the city and its Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti, claimimg that the paint job is, a “violation of all my work and values”.

The mayor is offering to sell the work back to the artist for the 9,000 Euros they paid for it originally.