French court finds Jeff Koons guilty of plagiarism

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French court finds Jeff Koons guilty of plagiarism | A French court has ruled that the artist Jeff Koons is guilty of plagiarism, reports the Telegraph. Concluding a four-year legal battle between Koons and a French advertising executive, Franck Davidovici, the court decided in the latter’s favour that Koons’ sculpture Fait D’Hiver (1988) infringed copyright in replicating Davidovici’s 1985 advertising campaign for the fashion brand Naf Naf. Koons, his business and the Centre Pompidou (which exhibited the work in 2014) have been ordered to pay a total of €135,000 in compensation.

€660m funding boost for Berlin’s Natural History Museum | The Natural History Museum in Berlin will receive a total of €660m in additional funding over the next decade from the German Bundestag and the city of Berlin to fund the museum’s refurbishment project. Founded in 1810, the museum houses more than 30 million prehistoric and zoological specimens and objects; besides renovation, the project includes the development of the campus and to modernise the museum’s exhibition space and research facilities.

The Met appoints Andrea Bayer as deputy director of collections | Andrea Bayer is to take up the position of deputy director for collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bayer first joined the museum’s European paintings department in 1990; the museum’s director, Max Hollein, described her as ‘a highly-respected scholar, an imaginative exhibition curator and an esteemed colleague at the Met.’