Museum of Louvre should invite French to celebrate their Monument to Inequality, and tourists to take selfies

Sir, Jo Ellison writes: In January, Jean-Luc Martinez, head of the Louvre, reported a decline of about 2m visitors to the glass pyramid on the Rue de Rivoli, and a loss in revenues of €9.7m. He blamed the attacks as being key… The hotel sector has seen a simple decline: many have reported occupancy rates plummeting by up to 40 per cent. “A night at the museum: Louis Vuitton goes to the Louvre, as Nicolas Ghesquière’s AW17 collection celebrates ‘brand Paris’” March 9.

I sat down with my daughter Alexandra, an art consultant with a M.A. from Christie's Education in Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market, to discuss Louvre’s really horrific decline in visitors. We came to the following (quite preliminary) conclusions.

First that it might be Louvre have catered too much to the tourist and in the process forgotten their nationals. There I suggested an invitation to Thomas Piketty and all his fellow countrymen to come and celebrate more often that great Monument to Inequality that The Museum of Louvre represents. (I am not entirely sure Alexandra was 100% with me on that one… perhaps only 99%  J  )

Also, since the drop in hotel occupancy rates might have also to do with competition from Airbnb, it could result in tourists not feeling as tourists as usual and therefore not behaving as much as tourists, meaning among other, going less to museums. In order to combat this perhaps the Louvre must launch a campaign declaring anyone who has not taken a selfie at the Louvre as not really having been in Paris.

The origins of the selfie is to be found at Louvre

@PerKurowski

According to FT’s research, how much do minimum wages and absence of payroll taxes favour robots?

Sir, Vanessa Houlder writes: “When you book an Airbnb room in London, around a third of the $100 saving you make over the price of an average hotel room is due to tax advantages which favour Airbnb’s business model, according to research by the Financial Times” “Airbnb makes most of legal wiggle room to beat hotels” January 3.

Houlder goes on with: “Research from Morgan reported a higher than expected “cannibalisation of traditional hotels” over the past year, citing survey findings that 49 per cent of Airbnb users in the US, UK, France, and Germany had replaced a hotel stay with a stay booked through the online group.”

Indeed, since it is a human owner of an apartment eating up the opportunity from a human owner of a hotel room, it could be described as “cannibalization”. But, how should we describe when for instance a robot or a driverless car takes away a job opportunity from humans? If, for instance, that happens only because of minimum wages and absence of payroll taxes, is that more like human-offerings at the altar of automation and technology?

@PerKurowski