Why Jeff Koons & the Château de Versailles Are Actually Just Like Peas & Carrots (excerpt)

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We took a day trip to the Palace of Versailles. “I love how everyone there will be walking around, in awe of the opulence and trying to put themselves in the place of Louis XIV,” said my husband, who had been there once many years ago, “but you will be so angry.” He meant that my politics are such that I would be interested in Versailles more as a cause of the French Revolution than as a thing of beauty to be awed by.

He was right. I was fired up and ready to go. But when I got to the Château, something stood in the way of the full force of my anger, making me, in a way, even more angry – just about something different – or maybe not. That thing was Jeff Koons’s art.

The first thing one sees upon arriving in the front courtyard of the palace is “Balloon Flower (Yellow),” an enormous twisted-up sculpture in yellow high chromium stainless steel that apparently is meant to recall childhood but to me instead recalls intestines or other unfortunately nearby parts. I was confused, as I had not looked up anything current about the Château before venturing there, simply wanting to experience it, and I did not understand why or how a very large and ugly contemporary piece of art had landed in the Great Courtyard. I tried to ignore it and we gazed around the acres – yes, acres – of the cobblestoned courtyard. Finally I gave in. “What is that,” I said to my husband. I know very well who Jeff Koons is, and I knew exactly what this thing was. “Let’s go in,” said my husband, not wanting to provoke me (yet).

I would have loved to have seen “Balloon Flower (Yellow)” in the Centre Pompidou, which houses the Musée National d’Art Moderne. There, I would likely have had the same reaction to the actual pieces (as I told my husband, on our way out, the title of this piece should be: “Jeff Koons: I Don’t Know”), but they wouldn’t have competed with their setting in the way they did at Versailles, where I was distracted by hanging lobster rafts, giant balloon creatures and old vacuum cleaners (for real). I was annoyed that I was looking at them and not the ornate obscenity that is the Château. (I was so bugged out, in fact, by the time I got to “New Hoover Convertibles Green, Green, Red, New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 5-Gallon, Displaced Tripledecker,” a fairly self-explanatory “sculpture” in the Antechamber of the Great Dining Hall, that I had turned off the audio guide. So I don’t actually know what that’s supposed to be about. And I don’t care.) I wanted to be overwhelmed by the unrivaled display of ego and unfettered opulence and unchecked power that Versailles actually was. How often does one have the chance to visit a physical space that is so heavy with history, so saturated in the blood and spirit of revolution? You look at Versailles, and you do not have to try very hard to imagine why it angered the masses: Historian William Doyle calls it “a really staggering example of extravagance at the taxpayers’ expense” and describes how Louis XIV built his court there by richly rewarding its inhabitants and thereby domesticating even the people who thought they had power because they merely had the king’s favor. One of the greatest mysteries of monarchy to me is how so few bamboozled so many, and Versailles offers a window into that weird cocktail of class and power and timing and history that few other existing places can.

To be somewhat fair to J. Koons, any artist who had been curated there would have distracted me. The Château of Versailles is already a museum – it needs no additional pieces. “At the end of the Ancien Régime (of Absolute Monarchy), the palace was without doubt the most sumptuous royal residence in the whole of the Europe, and the works of art that the kings had accumulated there for over a century had turned it into an incomparable museum,” according to the hefty, 15 Euro Guide we bought in the gift shop. So, since the end of the height of absolute power of the king (the early 1700s), this place was a museum, and a world-class one at that. Even long after the days of absolute monarchy, when France still couldn’t quite rid itself of monarchs, Louis-Philippe toward the end of the empire in the 1830s decided to transform it into a museum dedicated “To All the Glories of France,” a slogan which still adorns the palace’s outer façade. The walls are covered in the art of Charles Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David, the furniture made by the best in the business, the sculptures contributed by Coustou and Puget and so many others (I haven’t even tried to mention the famed sculpture gardens outside that stretch for miles around this castle)…there’s not an inch of wall or floor or ground or fountain space left. J. Koons’s art is actually suspended from the ceiling in most instances. In other words, adding any more art to Versailles is like sprinkling sugar over ice cream: Who does that?

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