The Paris Review

Racy Public Art Exposes Paris’s Invisible Borders

Joep van Lieshout at the unveiling of Domesticator at the Centre Pompidou. Photo: Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt for Carpenters Workshop Gallery

This week, after a social-media barrage declared it obscene, officials refused to install a sculpture called Domestikator in the Tuileries Gardens near the Louvre. The same piece was then accepted by, and set up outside, the Pompidou, a contemporary-art museum less than a mile down the road.

The piece in question, by the Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, is of

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