©JEFF KOONS/COURTESY NOIRMONTARTPRODUCTION
Big Installations
After an outcry from members of the French art world, Jeff Koons’s Bouquet of Tulips, a monument to the victims of a 2015 terrorist attack, will no longer be installed in front of the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Koons will now meet with French officials to determine a new place to install the work in the French capital. [Le Figaro]
The Venice Architecture Biennale’s Golden Lion award has gone to the Swiss Pavilion, for a project that plays with viewers’ sense of scale in empty apartments. The British Pavilion and RMA Architects received special mentions, while the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement went to Kenneth Frampton. [Designboom]
Losses
After a drunk visitor damaged an 1885 painting in its collection via a metal pole, Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery said it would consider stopping the sale of alcohol on its premises. [Reuters]
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian writes on the Pit gallery’s Glendale Biennial, which, despite taking place in a Los Angeles neighborhood whose population is about 40 percent Armenian, features no Armenian artists. “The irony plainly speaks itself: one show documented the attempted erasure of a population,” she writes. [Los Angeles Review of Books]
Returns
New York’s District Attorney has filed a motion with the state’s Supreme Court that demands the return of a 5th-century Persian artifact to Iran. It had been previously been seized from Rupert Wace’s booth at the TEFAF New York fair. [The Art Newspaper]
Around New York
Brian Boucher, previously a senior writer at Artnet News, will now be creative director of New York’s Sperone Westwater gallery. [Artnet News]
Peter Schjeldahl addresses the Museum of Modern Art’s Bodys Isek Kingelez survey, which he notes is “wonderfully installed.” The Congolese artist’s colorful visions of utopias are, he writes, “daintily powerful, say, or deliriously serene.” [The New Yorker]
Shannon Ebner has been named the chair of Pratt Institute’s photography department. [Artforum]
Market
This summer, an exhibition of work by Banksy made between 2002 and 2008 could break records. The show will be mounted at London’s Lazinc gallery, and is unsanctioned by the street artist—not that Banksy cares much about that. [The Art Newspaper]