Jeff Koons to Pay $46,500 USD in Fines for Counterfeiting
A French court ruled in favor of photographer Jean-François Bauret’s heirs.
Artist Jeff Koons can’t seem to shake off news of plagiarism attached to his name. As reported by Le Monde, Jeff Koons LLC along with the Centre Pompidou has now been ordered by a French court to pay a total of $46,500 USD in fines to the estate of the photographer Jean-François Bauret. This includes revenue damages, legal costs, and an image posted on the pop artist’s online page.
The piece involved is the 1988 Koons work Naked, which Jean-François Bauret’s heirs argued is a counterfeit of a 1975 image taken by the now-deceased photographer. Naked is part of Koons’s “Banality” series and is a porcelain sculpture depicting a naked boy offering flowers to a naked girl. In 2008, a copy of the piece was sold for $8 million USD.
See the Jean-François Bauret photograph and Jeff Koons’s Naked sculpture below:
