Squatting artists

Paris

The city of Paris will pay $3.5 million to renovate a downtown office building so that the artists who have been squatting there rent-free will be more comfortable. A group of 40 itinerant artists broke into the abandoned building a few blocks from the Louvre in 1999 and set up studios. Rather than evict them, the city bought the building at a cost of $4.5 million, and now it has agreed to pay for maintenance as well. “We represent a new way of bringing art to the public,” said the group’s beret-topped leader, Gaspard Delanoë. “We create and exhibit in the same location.” The building attracts 40,000 visitors a year and offers such works as a mural that proclaims: “The 21st Century Will Taste of Cheese or Not at All.”

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