This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A year after the terror attacks that struck Paris in November 2015, Jeff Koons said he would give the city a monumental sculpture meant to honour the victims – but critics of the project are saying “no thanks”.

About two dozen artists, gallery owners and officials have written an open letter urging the city of Paris not to install the 12-metre-tall Bouquet of Tulips outside the Museum of Modern Art and adjacent Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art centre.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Koons announcing Bouquet of Tulips in 2016. Photograph: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images

The project – a giant hand holding multicoloured flowers – is meant to mimic the Statue of Liberty grasping its torch, but was denounced as a “product placement”, according to the letter, whose signatories include the film-maker Olivier Assayas and the former culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand.

“A brilliant and inventive creator in the 1980s, Jeff Koons has since become the emblem of industrial art which is spectacular and speculative,” it states.

But if the goal is to honour the victims of the deadliest terror attack ever on French soil, it says, “shouldn’t there be a call for submissions, as is usually the case, with an opportunity given to French artists?”

It also says the site for the work is nowhere near the Stade de France nor the Bataclan concert hall and its nearby bars and restaurants where jihadi attackers killed a total of 130 people.

Private donors financed the sculpture’s €3m (£2.6m) price tag, but taxpayers are on the hook for work required to reinforce the ground supporting the bronze, stainless steel and aluminium sculpture, the text says.

Koons, who is known for toying with objects from popular culture, said it was designed as an offering in memory of the victims and as a symbol of optimism, in an effort to help Parisians overcome the tragedy.

Signatories of the letter include the artists Christian Boltanski and Jean-Luc Moulène, and Émilie Cariou, an MP in President Emmanuel Macron’s LREM party and vice-president of parliament’s finances commission.