Watching Didier Courbot at work, you would probably think he was a nut.
The artist's most celebrated work, "Needs," is a series of photographs that finds Courbot in cities, performing weird but well-intentioned urban interventions -- planting flowers in the center of a busy traffic circle, lovingly watering the weeds that grow through cracks in a sidewalk, duct-taping a broken handrail on a pedestrian walkway.
Other Courbot pictures from the series, those which document the aftereffects of his actions, similarly convey the idea that someone strange has been by. For example, we see a couple of old public benches in a Prague green space -- but on one of the benches, a single slat of the weatherworn wood has been replaced by a new, unvarnished one. The picture is just mildly unsettling. More importantly, it points us toward an interesting line of reasoning: No city work crew, it is clear, would do such an unprofessional repair job on the bench, so this was apparently done in an unofficial capacity, probably by a member of the public. What business, we may then wonder, does a member of the public have fixing public property? Is this, in fact, vandalism? Ah, the irony.