International News Digest
SUN KING DESCENDANT LOSES CASE AGAINST KOONS EXHIBITION AT VERSAILLES; THREATENS TO TAKE CASE TO HIGHER COURT
The descendant of King Louis XIV who attempted to close the Jeff Koons exhibition at the Palace of Versailles has lost his court case. As Agence France-Presse reports, a judge from the administrative court of Versailles rejected the complaint filed by Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon-Parme. De Bourbon-Parme claimed that the exhibition, which integrates Koons’s sculptures into the castle and its gardens, constituted a profanation of the work of his forefather and undermined fundamental human freedoms, particularly the respect due to the dead. The lawyer for Versailles, a public museum and national territory, pointed out the lack of judicial foundations for the complaint and noted that the castle-cum-museum welcomes “exhibitions of works from the past but also from the present.” De Bourbon-Parme’s lawyer described the “mercantile” and “pornographic” dimensions of the exhibition and added that “children should have the right to access national heritage without being confronted by the sight of these extremely unsound sculptures.” The judge disagreed, noting in his statement, “The existence of a right to live without the profanation of one’s ancestors and of a right to access knowledge of heritage without pornographic constraints does not constitute a fundamental freedom.” There have been five hundred thousand visitors to the exhibition since it opened in October, and it will continue its extended run until January 4.
Not to be deterred, de Bourbon-Parme has announced that he will take his case against the Koons exhibition at Versailles to the Conseil d’Etat (the Council of State), the highest administrative jurisdiction in France. According to a report from Agence France-Presse, de Bourbon-Parme evoked the recent celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in explaining the reasons for his appeal. His action was about “deciding whether, for the sixty years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 in Paris, the respect due to the dead, the right to live without profanation of one’s ancestors without their works being defiled in the eyes of the entire world with a scene of derision and pornography—whether this immemorial mark of humanity, distinguishing man from animal, still constitutes in our day a fundamental freedom in France.”
LOUVRE AS FILM SET
The New York Times’s Joan Dupont writes that “strange things have been happening at the Louvre recently,” from a stag running wild in the gardens of the Tuileries to the sounds of a piano emanating from Napoleon III’s former apartments. “And the ravishing Laetitia Casta, the latest model for the bust of Marianne, who represents the French Republic across the country, was spotted half-naked among dusty pipes in the boiler room.” As Dupont explains, the Louvre is being used as a set for the latest effort of the Malaysian-born and Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang, who is filming the final scenes of his most recent film, Visages (Faces), inside the museum. Tsai, who has won prizes for his “moody reveries” at the Berlin, Cannes, and Venice film festivals, has directed I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006), Vive L’Amour (1994), The River (1997), and The Hole (2000), among other films. The use of the Louvre was instigated by the museum: Catherine Derosier-Pouchous, head of the Louvre’s film, audiovisual, and multimedia department, recognizes the museum’s potential. “We wanted to create a collection open to contemporary artists by inviting international directors with a singular artistic vision from Asia, America, and Europe,” Derosier-Pouchous told the Times. According to Dupont, the Louvre gave the director “complete artistic control over the project,” which was inspired by the invitation.
NUDITY AT CHINESE HERITAGE SITES
Nudity has reportedly come to accompany China’s national monuments. As Le Monde’s Emmanuelle Lequeux reports, a popular television interviewer has posed naked in front of more than a dozen of the country’s most famous historical sites for a series of photographs in the Lianzhou international photography festival. Ou Zhi Hang, a star who interviews actors and fashion models for a television station in the Canton region, has an estimated one hundred million viewers. He gave them a closer look at both himself and his country by posing au naturel in front of the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, the Herzog & de Meuron "Bird’s Nest" and even the ruins from the 2007 earthquake. “Very kitsch,” writes Lequeux. “These shots will not become part of art history. But in this country, where one doesn’t joke around with the representation of flesh or the symbols of power, they make for something to talk about.” At over eleven thousand dollars a print, the photographs show “the rise in power of an individual” in a society that has long emphasized the collective. For Ou, the sites may represent “the perfection of China,” but the buildings were realized by individuals. “Posing nude in front of them is a way of offering a homage to them,” Ou told Le Monde, adding that his action was not a provocation. “I just want to show that in a rapidly developing China, the arts are developing just as quickly.” But not as quickly as imagined. While the photographs passed the censors when they were shown in an official exhibition at the Beijing Opera, the show met trouble when it arrived at Lianzhou. One photograph was censored: Ou posing naked in front of Potala Palace in Lhasa. “I don’t know why the image was censored,” says Ou. “People in a small city like Lianzhou are very careful. For me, Tibet is nothing but an episode in our long history. As a Chinese, I am against its independence. As an artist, I would like to invite people to wonder for themselves about this question.”