Members of the French art community urge Paris not to abandon its plans to install Jeff Koons’s memorial Bouquet of Tulips dedicated to the victims of the 2015 terror attacks in Paris and Nice.
Jeff Koons’s Bouquet of Tulips, 2016, 3d illustration. Source: Jeff Koons/Noirmontartproduction/Artnet
The artist designed the memorial – a 10-metre bouquet of tulips – as a gift in 2016 to symbolise “remembrance, optimism, and healing”. The work faced severe criticism from artists and art professionals. They said the price France was to pay the artist from the country’s budget and private donations was too high. The location of the monument proposed by Jeff Koons provoked a dispute – he wanted to install it between the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville and the Palais de Tokyo. Protesters wrote an open letter, calling his gesture “opportunistic” and “cynical”.
In response to the criticism regarding Bouquet of Tulips, Le Monde published a high-sounding op-ed to defend Koons: “Let’s accept this Bouquet of Tulips for the symbolic tribute it embodies: a magnificent gesture of transnational generosity, a positive and colorful message delivered to current and future generations, as an echo to our beautiful motto… Thus, the parents of the victims, families, Parisians of all origins, tourists, and freedom lovers will be able to say that these three Latin words that we learned at school are not a dead language. Everyone will know that fluctuat nec mergitur also means 'give, receive, remember, live together, create the future: Paris,” Artforum reports.
The letter was signed by president of Galerie Lelong Jean Frémon, president of the administrative council of the Palais de Tokyo Jacques-Antoine Granjon and executor of the Picasso estate Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. In the letter, they note the proposed location between two museums is a natural place to put an artwork. The authors recall that the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre Pyramid, which later became iconic landmarks, provoked similar criticism and controversy.
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