Jeff Koons

Victor Pinchuk, one of Ukraine's richest men, plans to build a contemporary art center in downtown Kiev, with the hope of making the country's capital a major destination on the global art map. Pinchuk, 48, said in an interview that the new building will be bigger than his existing PinchukArtCentre, the first private center of contemporary art in the former Soviet Union. The new project will also supplement the regular shows already being held at the center that Pinchuk said has had more than 830,000 visitors since it opened in 2006.

The e-mail from a reader was unequivocal. "In all my visits to museums and galleries around the world," it said, "I have never seen an armed guard." By startling contrast, a show of force is inescapable at the newest addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. During a recent visit, I witnessed what prompted the e-mailer to write: three uniformed guards from a private security firm, each wearing a utility belt stocked with a holstered gun and baton, the latter the T-shaped type of billy club a beat cop might carry.

A rare set of three works by painter Francis Bacon was sold Monday by Christie's auction house for $34.5 million. Bacon painted the "Three Studies for a Self Portrait" in Paris in 1975. It is the first of a series of self portraits he painted around that time. It was bought by an unnamed buyer in 1976 and has since never been seen in public. A sculpture called "Balloon Flower Magenta" by Jeff Koons also sold for $25.8 million. It is the highest price Koons has received at auction.

At the Palace of Versailles, a marble statue of Louis XIV now shares space with some unlikely interlopers: an inflatable lobster, a giant balloon dog, and Michael Jackson and his pet chimp Bubbles, sculpted in porcelain. Officials at Versailles, the most gilded and over the top of French palaces, have let American artist Jeff Koons redecorate, and his eye-popping, zany sculptures are on display alongside masterpieces by Veronese and Bernini. The show, which runs through Dec. 14, is yet another sign that France's bastions of traditional culture are loosening up. The Louvre has played host to contemporary artists and even welcomed slam poets to perform in its echoing galleries.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is studying the feasibility of erecting a huge sculpture by Jeff Koons that would dangle a 70-foot fabricated train from the top of a 161-foot-tall crane on its Wilshire Boulevard campus. The yet-to-be-created work, which would be visible for miles, would turn its wheels, whistle and belch steam three times a day.

Philanthropist and art collector Eli Broad will soon have a new Jeff Koons piece for his massive contemporary art holdings: His art foundation has purchased Koons' yet-to-be-fabricated sculpture "Cracked Egg (Red)" for a reported $3.5 million from Gagosian's West End gallery in London. Gagosian London is currently showing another piece from the series, "Cracked Egg (Blue)."

American artist Jeff Koons plans to erect a 360-foot-tall sculpture in Hamburg, Germany -- two cranes with outsize inner tubes dangling down -- that he hopes will rival the effect of the Eiffel Tower. Koons was commissioned to redesign the Spielbudenplatz square, located near the Reeperbahn boulevard that runs through the port city's red-light district. Construction is slated to begin this year, said Mario Mettbach, the Hamburg official in charge of building projects.

"I've always looked at my art and what I do in a very moral way," says Jeff Koons, smiling sweetly as he surveys big, splashy, collage-like paintings in his exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. That may be news to longtime observers of the New York artist, who is largely known for merging childish desires and adult passions in kitsch statuary.

Why do we still bother with Jeff Koons? Hasn't that attention junkie gotten enough, with his 40-foot-high topiary puppy and his more-than-we-ever-wanted-to-know photographic sex diary? His big and brassy new paintings at Gagosian Gallery pull out all the stops again and are fairly panting for another adulation fix, but it's time instead to practice a little tough love. Forget--as Koons seemingly has--the old notions about artists answering an inner call, like prophets heeding a vision.