What Do the French Truly Think About Jeff Koons’s Divisive Gift? We Camped Out by the Sculpture for Three Days to Find Out

Jeff Koons’s memorial
sculpture, Bouquet of
Tulips, was finally
unveiled in Paris earlier this month after three years of ferocious
debate among the French public.  

The giant sculpture was
originally commissioned in 2015 by the then US ambassador, Jane
Hartley, as a memorial for Paris in the wake of a series of terror
attacks across France. As a gesture of Franco-American friendship,
the work is mean to evoke the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift
to the US from France. Instead of Lady Liberty’s hand gripping a
torch, however, Koons’s huge, hyper-realistic hand grips a bouquet
of the artist’s signature balloon tulips.

When the gift was first
announced, members of the French cultural establishment published an outraged
letter in the French daily Libération, calling it a “cynical” act of “product
placement.” The proposal for the sculpture was subjected to a
barrage of complaints, taking issue with everything from the cost
of production (though its $4 million cost ended up being raised
privately) to its location (it ended up being moved) and the
appropriateness of its shiny aesthetic.

Since its grand unveiling, the
41-foot-tall sculpture has been compared unfavorably to “eleven
colored anuses mounted on stems” by the French philosopher Yves
Michaud in the French publication L’Obs. A columnist for the New
Yorker called into question the choice of “a pallid,
disembodied hand” to memorialize the victims of a terror
attack. 

But what does the average French
person really think? During FIAC week, I stationed myself next to the sculpture over
three days and polled the locals for their thoughts. Surveying
students and octogenarians, civil servants and cosmetics industry
workers, here is what I discovered.

Room to Grow

Despite the intense controversy
the work has generated on the French cultural scene, just over half
of the 30 people I spoke to had a positive reaction to it. Eight
people gave a neutral or mixed response. Just six echoed the
vitriol for the sculpture that has been voiced in the press. While
this is far from a scientific survey, I put that at a 53 percent
approval rating in terms of my random sample.

Some people came just to
Instagram the glossy public sculpture. Those who praised it called
it “playful,” and “colorful,” and remarked on the “delightful
madness” of its clash with the surrounding architecture.

“I know he was put in a difficult
situation to justify the gesture; some people say he was doing it
more for personal gain rather than it being a true
gift,” Olivier Lerch, an employee of the ministry of
culture—and Koons fan—told me. “But regardless of what you think,
the ambiguity has put art center stage.” 

“I think the people who say they
hate it are like the people who, in another time, came out strongly
against the pyramid at the Louvre, or the Eiffel Tower,” says Guy
Dewonck, a public works employee.

Several people echoed that
sentiment. Indeed, when the Eiffel Tower was being built in 1887, a
group of high-minded French aesthetes wrote a similarly scathing
public letter opposing the “useless and monstrous” construction.
I.M. Pei’s now iconic glass pyramid at the Louvre also prompted
what came to be known as the Battle of the
Pyramid, with critics
calling it an eyesore.

Another respondent, Alberto
Olivieri, also noted the polemic surrounding the flashy,
experimental design for the Pompidou Center when it was first
inaugurated. “Like these others, little by little, Parisians will
get used to it,” he predicted. “It just takes time for an aura
to develop around something.”

Several of the people I spoke to
had made their way to see the work solely because of the flak it
was receiving in the press. Among these was a pair of
octogenarians, Jacqueline Duval and Nicole Leconte, who deemed the
work “curious,” but complemented the artist on his knowledge of
French culture: “Eleven tulips is good, as it is bad luck to offer
an even number of flowers in a bouquet.”

Every Tulip Has Its Thorns

But of course, not everyone was a
fan.

“I find it truly vile,”
Jean-Pierre Defaucigny, a collector and gallerist, said. “It is
very, very, ugly. I can’t believe that France, which is overflowing
with talented artists, would accept this. I am very sad. I won’t
say what the flowers make me think of, but I find them
indecent.”

Others were less careful with
their wording. “I don’t
know why he chose to be so realist with the hand. It has a perverse
element to it. Those stylized tulips, next to the realist textures
of the skin, it conjures up the association of an anus,” one
artist, who asked to remain unnamed, told me. “And Jeff Koons is an
artist who thinks about everything. He’s commercial, but he
thinks—it’s not an accident. So he’s giving us anuses, and that’s
not really a gift. Everyone thinks it’s a bouquet of tulips, but I
think it’s a bouquet of anuses.”

Indeed, the sculpture has already been colloquially dubbed a bouquet of “culipes,” a
portmanteau that roughly translates to “ass-tulips.”

Even families are divided on the
matter. One couple I spoke to, Isabelle and Jean-Luc Rimaud, were
at odds. While Isabelle called it “kitsch, through and through,”
her husband deemed it a “moving gesture” to a memorialize a serious
event.

“I think the people who died
deserve to be remembered, and with this thing, it’s hard to forget
them,” he said. “Whatever you think of the aesthetic, it is still a
strong gesture. In the years to come, what will we think? At least
we will remember them when we pass by.” Some 131 people died
in the November 2015 attacks.

A painter, Dominique Desme,
compared the “marshmallow tulips” to an ad for
Toys “R” Us, but conceded that “it was given in
friendship,” which, he says, “is better than declaring war.”
Another passerby, a cosmetology industry worker, Nell Zocly,
said that it was moving to know the world is with the French in the
wake of the tragedy. 

Finally, however, it was a
student, Arno Beringer, who offered some real talk. “Listen, I
think it’s nice,” he said. “It was a present, after all. Lots of
people are being really annoying about it, but that’s just a
classic French reaction, isn’t it? People love to criticize
stuff.”

The post What Do the French Truly Think About Jeff Koons’s
Divisive Gift? We Camped Out by the Sculpture for Three Days to
Find Out appeared first on artnet News.