On October 16, 2014, a 24-metre inflatable green sculpture appeared in Place Vendôme, one of Paris’s most historically charged squares — a site commissioned by Louis XIV, home to the Vendôme Column commemorating Napoleon’s military campaigns, and ringed by luxury jewellers. The sculpture was called Tree. Its creator was Paul McCarthy, a 69-year-old American artist known for decades of provocative, scatological, body-obsessed work that had made him one of the most divisive figures in contemporary art.
Tree was officially a Christmas tree — part of FIAC’s outdoor program “Hors les Murs,” installed as a teaser for McCarthy’s Chocolate Factory solo exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris. It had received all necessary approvals: from the Paris Prefecture of Police, the Mayor’s office, the Ministry of Culture, and the Comité Vendôme, the business association representing the square’s merchants.
Within 48 hours, the artist had been physically assaulted, the sculpture had been slashed and deflated by vandals, and McCarthy had refused to have it reinstalled. The work that was meant to stand for ten days became, instead, one of the most talked-about public art incidents of the 21st century — and a case study in the explosive relationship between contemporary art, historic public space, and the limits of provocation.
What It Was
To be precise about what happened, we must first be precise about what Tree looked like.
It was a bulbous, glossy green inflatable form tapering to a rounded top, capped with a small red ornament. In its proportions, materials, and sheer scale, it bore an unmistakable resemblance to an anal plug. McCarthy was candid about this. In an interview with Le Monde, he explained that the design began with a visual joke: he had noticed that butt plugs have a shape similar to the sculptures of Constantin Brâncuși, the Romanian modernist master of abstracted organic forms. From there, he realised the shape also evoked a stylised Christmas tree. The piece, he said, was “more of an abstraction” — though he also acknowledged the deliberate ambiguity.
Jennifer Flay, the artistic director of FIAC, was equally forthright. “Of course this work is controversial,” she told Le Monde. “It plays on the ambiguity between a Christmas tree and a plug: this is neither a surprise nor a secret.”
McCarthy’s intention was layered. Tree was a critique of consumer culture (Christmas as capitalism’s holiest sacrament), a playful art-historical reference (Brâncuși, Hans Arp, the Dadaist tradition of using abstraction to discomfit), and a spatial provocation — placing a monumental, deliberately vulgar form next to the Napoleonic column. Two towers in one square: one commemorating military glory, the other mocking it with inflatable absurdity.
What Happened
The reaction was immediate and violent — in both the metaphorical and literal senses.
On the day of installation, while McCarthy was speaking with a Le Monde journalist about the completed work, an unidentified person approached, asked if he was the artist, and upon receiving confirmation, struck him in the face repeatedly. The assailant reportedly screamed that McCarthy had insulted France and that his work did not belong in the square — adding, for good measure, that McCarthy was not French. McCarthy later told The Hollywood Reporter that the blows were hard and left him visibly shaken.
By the next morning, #Vendôme, #PlugGate, and #buttplug were trending on Twitter. The far-right movement Printemps Français — a group that had emerged from opposition to same-sex marriage legislation — tweeted: “Place Vendôme disfigured! Paris humiliated!” Jérôme Dubus, a right-wing local official, called on Mayor Anne Hidalgo to remove the work. Thousands of social media posts oscillated between outrage and comedy, as tourists posed for knowing photographs with the sculpture.
On the night of October 17-18, unidentified vandals scaled the fencing around the work, cut the power supply keeping it inflated, and slashed the support straps. By morning, the 24-metre Christmas tree lay deflated on the cobblestones of Place Vendôme — a sad, bright-green puddle.
The Response
The political and cultural establishment rallied to McCarthy’s defense — at least officially.
Fleur Pellerin, France’s Minister of Culture, called the vandalism “an intolerable infringement of creative freedom.” Mayor Hidalgo tweeted that Paris “will not yield to the threats of those who, by attacking an artist and his work, attack artistic freedom.” Most strikingly, President François Hollande issued a formal statement: “France will always be on the side of artists, just as I am on the side of Paul McCarthy, whose work was sullied, no matter what one’s opinion of the piece may have been.”
Éric Mézil, director of the Collection Lambert in Avignon — where Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ had been physically destroyed by vandals in 2011 — called the assault “staggering,” warning that France was “sending a signal of intellectual poverty, crass ignorance, and extremely violent intolerance.”
FIAC initially announced plans to reinstall the work. But McCarthy himself decided otherwise. “Instead of the piece being about a discussion about how objects exist as language with layers of meaning, a violent reaction occurred,” he said in a statement. “I am not interested in the possibility of such confrontation and physical violence, or continuing to put those around the object at risk.”
The joke, as he later put it, had been told. There was no use telling it again.
Why It Matters
The Tree affair matters for several reasons that extend well beyond one artist and one sculpture.
First, it demonstrated that the taboo in public art is not nudity, nor even explicit sexual content, but ambiguity in a site of national identity. Place Vendôme is not a gallery. It is a spatial condensation of French self-image — royalty, military triumph, luxury commerce. What enraged critics was not that McCarthy had made something obscene (Paris has seen far worse) but that he had placed something deliberately unreadable — is it a tree? is it a sex toy? is it an art-historical reference? — in a space that demands clarity about what France is. The ambiguity was the provocation. The location was the catalyst.
Second, it exposed the fragility of institutional support for public art. Every official body — the municipality, the police prefecture, the Culture Ministry, the Comité Vendôme — had approved Tree. When it was attacked, every official body expressed solidarity with the artist. And yet the work was gone within 48 hours. The approvals could not protect it. The solidarity could not restore it. The artist himself was the one who withdrew, not because he lacked courage, but because the conditions for meaningful engagement had been destroyed by violence. The institutional framework for supporting provocative public art proved structurally incapable of actually defending it in real time.
Third, it was a precursor. Six years before the George Floyd protests sent Confederate statues crashing into rivers and squares across the Western world, Tree already demonstrated the central mechanism of public monument controversies: the physical object becomes a proxy for a much larger argument about identity, power, and belonging. Whether the target is a Confederate general, a slave trader, a colonial explorer, or a giant green inflatable that might be a sex toy, the question is always the same — who decides what stands in public space, and what it means?
The Aftermath
McCarthy responded in his own way. His Chocolate Factory exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris opened as planned on October 25, 2014, featuring a fully functioning chocolate production line producing confectionary Santas and Christmas trees in forms that left no room for ambiguity. He also created a new installation — a bed and video piece in which he re-enacted the insults hurled at him at Place Vendôme, including “You dirty American,” “You shouldn’t be here,” and “Your work is degenerate.”
In 2021, he revisited the incident for the first time publicly, in an interview with HighSnobiety. He kept the inflatable stored in a crate in his studio. He showed the interviewer a collection of dead Christmas tree branches he keeps in his office. He seemed, seven years later, at once amused and unsurprised.
“Consumer culture is so destructive,” he said. “Santa Claus is the god of consumerism. It’s just so iconic for me; it’s a signifier of Western civilization.”
The Brâncuși reference — the one that started the whole chain of associations — has its own quiet irony. Brâncuși, the Romanian sculptor who revolutionised modernist form, spent most of his working life in Paris, where he was celebrated. McCarthy, the American artist who tried to honour that legacy through comic distortion, was punched in the face for it. Both artists made work that reduced complex forms to their essential shapes. The difference was that one did it in bronze, and the other in inflatable vinyl — and that audiences in 1920 were apparently more tolerant of radical abstraction than audiences in 2014.
Or perhaps the lesson is simpler: context is everything. A Brâncuși in a museum is a treasure. A Brâncuși in Place Vendôme, made green, blown up to 24 metres, and shaped like a sex toy, is a national emergency.
Source transparency note:
This editorial draws on reporting from the following outlets: Artnet News (international art industry press, New York-based); France 24 (French state-funded international news, editorially independent); Le Monde (centre-left, France’s newspaper of record — original French-language source for McCarthy’s key quotes); Franceinfo (French public radio/digital, non-partisan); The Guardian / Jonathan Jones column (centre-left, UK); HuffPost (left-leaning, U.S. digital media); Hyperallergic (independent U.S. arts journalism, progressive-leaning); CityMonitor (urban affairs journalism, UK); HighSnobiety (culture/fashion media, Berlin-based — source of McCarthy’s 2021 retrospective interview); The Hollywood Reporter (entertainment industry trade press); Artlyst (independent UK arts journalism); Global News Canada (mainstream Canadian news, using Reuters wire); L’Orient-Le Jour (Lebanese French-language daily, independent); Cultured Magazine (U.S. arts/culture publication); Wikipedia (crowd-sourced, used for factual cross-referencing); Sternberg Press (academic publisher, primary source for the Paul in Paris / Paris in Paul publication); FIAC / Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (now defunct, replaced by Art Basel Paris in 2022 — historical institutional source).
Printemps Français, cited in the text as a vocal critic of the installation, was a far-right movement that emerged from opposition to France’s 2013 same-sex marriage law (“Mariage pour tous”), combining identitarian activists and traditionalist Catholics. Éric Zemmour, also cited as a critic, is a far-right French media commentator and 2022 presidential candidate. Their opposition to Tree should be read in the context of a broader culture-war agenda that extended well beyond art criticism.
(photo Paul McCarthy, Tree (2014) installed at Place Vendome in Paris, France, 2014. Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images, source ArtNet)
