French artist Julien Berthier created this boat. According to him, "Love love is the permanent and mobile image of a wrecked ship that has become a functional and safe leisure object".Im not sure the Health and Safety Executive would agree with him about the last part.
Heres what the gallery that displayed it said.
"For this piece he adapted an abandoned 6.5 meter yacht so that it appears to be perpetually sinking. To create this, the vessel was split and a new keel was constructed allowing it to be sailed by Berthier at a 45 degree angle off the coast of Normandy. Love-Love, like much of his oeuvre, is impressive, poetic and humorous.
In this project, the artist invests his energies and resources into creating an art of fiasco, aiming in his words to “fix an object at the moment of its deregulation.” The image, and metaphor of the sinking ship is an iconic one – it signifies death, lost hope and sinking dreams. Berthier’s Love-Love freezes those sentiments permanently both celebrating and overturning them. On display in the gallery will be the boat itself as well as a series of accompanying photographs and documentary video showing the performance in Normandy."
Mr Berthier knows something most of us dont, though - how to make money out of old boats. He is reported to have sold this one for £50,000.
Love Love from julien berthier on Vimeo.
When stories are told about the early days of short and single-handed long distance ocean racing, the names of Chichester, Hasler and the French hero Eric Tabarly are the most easily remembered. Its often forgotten that only one Frenchman took part in the first Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic race - and it wasnt Tabarly.
Lacombes “Cap-Horn” was a compact weekend family cruiser of 21ft overall, built by Jouet, a well established boat building firm in Sartrouville, on the River Seine. It was a design that, though simple, was rather more sophisticated than the type of basic small cruising boat that was becoming popular in France in the 1950s, when the influential Glenans Sailing School began to turn out a few dozen enthusiastic young sailors every summer. 
The plywood Herbulot designs of the day, simple, compact, practical and inexpensive, were emblematic of French sailing in the 50s and early 60s. Just a year after the first OSTAR, however, Frances first all-GRP production cruising boat emerged from the Jouet factory, and Cap-Horns strong and lightweight cold moulded construction suddenly seemed old fashioned and labour intensive compared with the new high-tech material. 
Cap-Horn built by P. Jouet & Cie, designed J. J. Herbulot
The French designer, Philippe Starck is best known for his furniture and kitchen gadget designs, including his iconic lemon juicer. He is not, as far as I know, a naval architect, yet the most exciting and, to my mind, most beautiful of the worlds billionaire mega-yachts has its origin on Starcks drawing board. 
Apart from sheer stylish looks, the clean lines of the exterior answer another function – that of security. The lack of any external features such as rails, handholds, or openings makes it very difficult for pirates or other undesired visitors to board the ship. For the same reason, the helicopter pad on the bow is easily rendered unusable by extending a telescopic mast through the deck. Clamshell doors hide all the access points, including the garage for the 2 launches, extending harbour gangways and even the anchor cable fairleads. 
The yacht is variously said to have cost $200 to $300 million. Crew salaries, maintenance and running costs are unlikely to be less than another 5 to 10 million a year. So, its not enough to be very rich indeed - Wayne Rooney rich, for instance - to own this yacht. You need to be able to spend twice Waynes annual salary, every year, just to run it. Fortunately for Mr. Melnichenko, whose wealth is conservatively estimated at $2-3 billion, he can. 
Obviously the interior décor is super palatial. I wont even try to describe it. You can find more details in the Wall Street Journal video and on the sites to which I have linked below. But the accessory I really like, and which makes me warm greatly to the scarily rich Mr. Melnichenko, is the uncompromising design of the yachts twin 30 ft. motor-launch tenders. He could easily have bought a couple of off-the-shelf plastic speedboats, and in spite of the fact that each one of these beauties probably cost as much as a very nice house in Torremolinos, he clearly would have nothing that was not rare and spectacular for his yacht. This, for Mr Melnichenko was probably no more of an extravagance than my purchase of a pair of shiny bronze rowlocks, instead of perfectly serviceable plain galvanised, for my 10 ft rowing dinghy. 
André Mauric was the most prolific and best known of Frances 20th century yacht designers. His career started in the 1920s with radical designs for racing yachts to the International Metre Rule in the days when the bermudan rig was still considered new-fangled and fragile, and carried on well into the 1980s when, among other winners he designed the the highly successful Atlantic crossing record breaker Kriter VIII. In between he designed dozens of great boats, including Pen Duick VI for Eric Tabarly, the 1972 Half Ton Cup winner Impensable, the popular and successful First 30, and Sylphe, a classic yacht hidden for 5 years underwater.
After the war Sylphe was recovered and completed. Her long submersion had done no harm – indeed it may have further improved the seasoning of her timbers and made them less liable to distort, crack, or split in later age. She was finally launched in 1947, and though Mauric had designed her with one of his trademark tall bermudan cutter rigs supported on a slender mast, her sailplan was modified in 1953 to give her a larger and taller foretriangle, its foot extended by a short bowsprit. These modifications were no doubt intended to keep her competitive with the latest offshore racing boats which, encouraged by the allowances in the old RORC rating rule, had begun to sport big overlapping genoas and high aspect mainsails. 
Her new Dutch owners sailed her to Turkey and set about a 7-month total overhaul to make her more suitable for Mediterranean charter use. Although the interior had mostly to be stripped out and rebuilt to provide more comfortable charter accommodation, the original hull timbers and planking, having endured such a long submersion so many years ago, were found to be in excellent order. Only a couple of rot-infected frames had to be replaced. Her owners are proud to claim that Sylphe still has none of the steel bracing and reinforcement that many other yachts of her day now need to keep them in sailing order. They are equally proud that she retains her original mast winches and her unique, custom made, cockpit sheet winches. 
