After bluntly saying “non” to your shitty love locks—paired with smugly pursed lips, dangling a cigarette—Paris has upped and removed thousands of locks from the historic Pont Des Arts, after a curious tourist phenomenon, spurred by lust, legitimately threatened the structural integrity of a timeless monument.
This week, the City of Paris predicted that tourists sheeple wouldn’t simply cease attaching metal analogies of their—no doubt, everlasting—love to the bridge’s rails; to curb the movement, street art inspired by the love locks was erected instead.
Clever move.
The scene has become a tourist attraction in and of itself, still luring heady couples to its mark on Paris’ map, but deterring the lock-hanging propensities of yore. One work, by notorious Franco-Tunisian street artist el Seed, reads, in Arabic: “Paris is in truth an ocean, you can plumb it but you’ll never know its depths.“
Another work, spanning the bridge, takes cheeky cues from Keith Haring:
Another shows locks melting into oblivion:
With a passerby having the audacity to ask, où sont les cadenas? (Where are the locks?) Destroyed, dummy.
While another work reiterates – love is the key, not a stupid fucking lock.
via ABC.
Image via Instagram.
