How I threw away a work of modern art

by Dramelin 8:30 PM 0 comments

To me, it looked like a child`s crude attempt at a mosaic.
About a dozen small square tiles of different colours.
Glued to the wall in a geometric design vaguely resembling a face with two square eyes.
It stood out in the otherwise empty and dingy Paris flat.
Once my home, I was moving back in, after nearly 20 years away.
My tenants, three young single men, were showing me round before they left.
"What`s that?" I asked, pointing at the cluster of tiles.
"That`s by Invader," my tenant replied.
"He`s a street artist.
He`s like a French Banksy.
" I quite liked Banksy, but the young man must have seen that I didn`t appear overly impressed by his French counterpart.
"You must leave this," he said earnestly.
"One day it will be worth a lot of money.
" Being British, I nodded politely - but inwardly I chortled at the notion that a few tiles stuck on a bedroom wall could ever be considered a work of art.
Trying to prove I wasn`t too old to get it, I said: "It reminds me of something.
" After struggling for a few seconds to recall exactly what, I exclaimed triumphantly: "Tetris!" Now it was his turn to look dubious, so I explained: "You know, the video game from the 80s.
" "Not Tetris," he said, mock-patiently.
The mother of modern video games.
" He added: "The artist came to one of our parties and ended up staying a few months.
It was his way of saying thank you.
Now we`re leaving it for you.
" Read more about Invader My neighbours had complained over the years - with varying degrees of indignation and perhaps envy - that the three young men had thrown raucous parties nearly every weekend.
The flat was such a wreck that my tenant admitted that, when he was working during the week as an up-and-coming executive, he stayed at his girlfriend`s.
Now he was getting married, while I was about to transform the bachelor party pad back into a respectable bourgeois home.
I duly promised the young men that I would look after the artwork and thanked them for leaving it.
But then the builders came to replaster and repaint the room.
"I might leave that," I told them.
They looked at me sceptically.
"Why do you want to keep it? It will look strange," the painter said.
I hesitated, but only for a moment.
The wall was stripped, replastered and painted a tasteful shade of blanc cassé - off-white, far more aesthetically pleasing than a bunch of multicoloured tiles.
That was nine years ago, when I was moving back to France.
Find out more As the years passed, I noticed more of the Space Invaders mosaics on buildings around Paris.
Never did I feel a twinge of regret for destroying the one in my flat.
Then, two years ago, it began to dawn on me what I`d done.
I reported on how one of the distinctive mosaics of the French street artist known as Invader was about to be displayed - on board the International Space Station.
The European Space Agency said it would - in their words - highlight the bridges between art and space.
It was bigger, but otherwise similar to the one I`d unceremoniously stripped out of my flat.
Invader was a global phenomenon, famous in New York, Hong Kong, London, and of course Paris.
Then came the real blow.
To my horror, I learned that one of his works had sold for more than €200,000 (£178,000; $233,000).
The mosaics I`d once scoffed at are now so sought-after that thieves posing as municipal workers in high-visibility vests went around Paris this summer carefully removing them.
Theft and vandalism have always been problems for Invader, a graduate of the Paris School of Fine Arts who was born in 1969, the year man landed on the Moon.
But there`s a fightback: fans known as "reactivators" photograph his works and reconstruct those that get damaged or disappear.
Had I taken a picture of the one in my flat, I could have called in the reactivators.
Now, I`ll just have to live with the fact that I tossed out a valuable work of art because I preferred a smooth, blank, white wall.
Perhaps I could try to market a piece of that as a work of art.
But hold on a minute - hasn`t someone already come up with that concept?.