Installation view of Jeff Koons’s ‘Banality’ series with “Naked” (1988) at far left (all photos by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)
A second sculpture by Jeff Koons is conspicuously absent from his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou after a photographer’s widow complained to the art star and the museum’s administration that “Naked” (1988) constituted copyright infringement. According to Claude Bauret-Allard, the sculpture is directly inspired by a nude photo portrait of a young boy and girl by her husband Jean-François Bauret, who died in January of this year.
Koons and the Pompidou have not responded to Bauret-Allard’s letter, but “Naked” is not on view in the exhibition, though wall text in the Pompidou galleries suggests it was intended to be. The work is included in the exhibition catalogue, and was showcased alongside other works in the Banality series during the show’s presentation at the Whitney Museum in New York. According to the Pompidou, the decision not to display “Naked” had nothing to do with the copyright infringement claim.
The back of Jeff Koons’s “Naked” (1988) (click to enlarge)
“We noticed that the sculpture was lightly damaged, presumably during transportation, and we decided not to show it,” a spokesperson for the Parisian museum told the Agence France-Presse.
“Naked” is the second sculpture in the Pompidou’s Koons retrospective to be the focus of copyright infringement claims. Earlier this month, Koons was sued by Franck Davidovici over the sculpture “Fait d’Hiver” (1988), which was subsequently removed from the exhibition.
“Similar questions have already been posed in the United States about other works in the Banality series, whose very principle is to take mass produced objects and images from the popular press as points of departure,” Pompidou president Alain Seban told the AFP. “A large part of modern and contemporary art is based on the concept of citation, or even appropriation.”
These legal — and, supposedly, shipping — setbacks have in no way dampened French enthusiasm for Koons. According to another AFP report, the exhibition racked up more than 112,000 visitors in its first 17 days — or 6,638 per day — and is on track to become the Pompidou’s best-attended show ever, a distinction currently held by a Salvador Dalí exhibition last year.
He’s kind of like at the über-corporate stage of his career where settlements for laws broken are just operating costs already built into the business model.
Well, a couple things about this. His art has ALWAYS been corporate art. Koons can never be accused of selling out because he was never “in” in the first place. He has just gotten to big and too brazen for the people he steals from to ignore anymore. In that way he is a lot like Damian Hirst, though Hirst is smart enough to steal ideas, not images and always from those too much further down the food chain to fight back effectively.
Jeff Koons: from commodity trader to owner of a derivative art manufactory.
From commodity trader to commodity trader, actually.
Who gives a shit?
The Banal Series? I thought that was all his work.