Takashi Murakami is facing as much resistance for his Manga-inspired exhibition at Versailles as Jeff Koons did two years ago. Agence France-Presse reports a number of petitions are circulating against Murakami's exhibition at the former royal residence of the "Sun King" Louis XIV. According to the President of the public castle, Jean Jacques Aillagon, the protesters come from "extreme right fundamentalist groups and very conservative groups" who want make Versailles into a "reliquary of nostalgia for France of the Ancien Regime, or a France withdrawn into itself and hostile to modernism".
Murakami says the exhibition is "a face-off between the Baroque period and postwar Japan" and that he hopes it will "create in visitors a sort of shock, an aesthetic feeling".
Images: Takashi Murakami at the Chateau de Versailles, France
