Last year, news broke that the Louvre planned to install a selection of Jeff Koons’ large-scale balloon sculptures in its nineteenth-century galleries. The exhibit was to complement the Centre Pompidou’s comprehensive Koons retrospective, which originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Now, according to The Art Newspaper, the Louvre has scrapped the Koons installation due to a “lack of funding.”
The works to be exhibited at the hallowed French institution included Balloon Rabbit, Balloon Swan, and Balloon Monkey. The massive sculptures, made of mirror-polished stainless steel, are notoriously difficult (and expensive) to install.