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  • [Jeff Koons: Versailles]

  • When you deal with the type of Baroque, Rococo architecture,

  • there's tremendous aspects of the symmetrical and the asymmetrical

  • and aspects of power.

  • Then there's a sensuality.

  • You have this kind of very ethereal, spiritual transcendence

  • that's in this type of architecture.

  • But you also have this sense of transcendence through sexuality.

  • In 1992, I did a piece called "Puppy".

  • And "Puppy," a large floral sculpture made out of 60,000 large flowers--

  • I conceived that piece really thinking of Louis XIV.

  • That's the type of work that Louis would have the fantasy for.

  • You know, he'd wake up in the morning,

  • he would look out of his schloss window, out of his palace,

  • and think, you know, "What do I want to see today?"

  • And, you know, "I want to see a puppy,"

  • "and I want to see it out of 60,000 plants,"

  • "and I want to see it by this evening," and, you know,

  • "go to it."

  • And that he would come home that night, and you know, voila, there it would be.

  • The really kind of surprising, wonderful parts of Versailles are how,

  • you know, wherever the king or the queen would move,

  • their environment would change with them.

  • So, if a king would walk through the gardens,

  • all of a sudden the fountains would start to flow

  • as he would walk in the different areas.

  • And then as he would leave an area, the fountains would be turned off,

  • and they’d be turned on in an area that he's proceeding to.

  • Or the same could happen with all the plants,

  • and all the flowers.

  • You could go to bed one night and your whole garden outside the palace,

  • everything’s red; every flower is red.

  • And you wake up in the morning and, during the night,

  • hundreds of gardeners changed every plant and now every plant’s blue.

  • And that's Versailles.

[Jeff Koons: Versailles]

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