Jeff Koons killed his review

An art magazine's decision to allow the famous artist to veto a historian's essay on his work has created "a chilling effect on critical culture,” Journalism said. said the expert.

It all started with the flowers and the hands that held them in the air.

Romy Golan remembers the day when, in a Parisian garden, she gazed at Jeff Koons' “Bouquet of Tulips,” a monumental sculpture that depicts a fist grasping 11 stems topped with balloon-shaped petals. She immediately saw a conceptual echo of a 1937 mural by Fernand Léger and Charlotte Perriand showing three hands holding up what look like wild roses.

Both reflected political events: with fascism at the time. Facing growing power across Europe, Léger and Perriand welcomed a newly elected French socialist government. Koons' sculpture, unveiled in 2019 at the Petit Palais, was intended to be a symbol of healing and a memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks that shook France a few years earlier.

To explore the use of similar motifs by artists of different generations, Golan, an art historian in New York, secured an interview with Koons, an influential but often polarizing artist who set auction records with his toy resembling a “Balloon Dog” and its brilliant “Rabbit Sculptures.” She then agreed to compare Koons' "Bouquet of Tulips" – described at the time by some French cultural figures of the time as "opportunistic, even cynical" – and Léger's mural as a guest critic for the Brooklyn Rail, an art museum in New York City. journal that publishes critical essays, reviews and writers such as Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem. Rail editor Charles Schultz gave it a thumbs up after submitting his article, writing that the essay "does justice to the memorial, its legacy, and its historical significance."

But all this quickly gave way to accusations and counter-accusations once the Koons studio read a copy of the unpublished essay. The artist's reaction: Kill the story.

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