Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (excerpt)

ROTHKOPF

JEFF KOONS

JEFF KOONS

Scott Rothkopf is the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Antonio Damasio is university professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California.

Jeffrey Deitch is an art dealer and curator.

Isabelle Graw is professor for art theory and art history and co-founder of the Institute for Art Criticism, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt.

Achim Hochdörfer is the director of the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, and chairperson of the Udo and Anette Brandhorst Foundation.

Michelle Kuo is editor-in-chief of Artforum.

Rachel Kushner is a novelist whose recent books include The Flamethrowers (2013) and Telex from Cuba (2008).

Alexander Nagel is professor of fine arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Distributed by Yale University Press for the Whitney Museum of American Art 306 color and 36 black-and-white illustrations

ISBN 978-0-300-19587-3

Jacket illustration: Large Vase of Flowers, 1991. Polychromed wood, 52 x 43 x 43 in. (132.1 x 109.2 x 109.2 cm). Edition no. 2/3. Collection of Norman and Norah Stone Cover illustration: Gazing Ball, 2014 Jacket design by Kloepfer – Ramsey – Kwon

Printed in the U.S.A.

A RETROSPECTIVE

Pamela M. Lee is professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University.

–– A RETROSPECTIVE SCOTT ROTHKOPF

–– With contributions by –– ANTONIO DAMASIO, JEFFREY DEITCH, ISABELLE GRAW, ACHIM HOCHDÖRFER, MICHELLE KUO, RACHEL KUSHNER, PAMELA M. LEE, AND ALEXANDER NAGEL

Over the past three decades, Jeff Koons (b. 1955) has become one of the most popular, influential, controversial, and important artists of the postwar period. Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, and challenged the limits of industrial fabrication in works of great beauty and emotional intensity. His elevation of familiar objects — inflatable toys, basketballs, vacuum cleaners — from the mundane to the exceptional shines a hard light on the world in which we live and art’s place within it. Koons has also transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market.

This volume surveys thirty-five years of the artist’s work, ranging from iconic sculptures to previously unpublished renderings. In an engaging essay that covers key themes, formal approaches, and complex techniques, Scott Rothkopf highlights the numerous ways Koons has broken ground or set new limits for artists.

In addition, short essays by a group of interdisciplinary contributors cover a variety of critical topics to illuminate the breadth of Koons’s cultural reach. Also included are preparatory sketches, installation photographs, and other archival materials that offer new insights and contexts in which to consider the development of Koons’s landmark career.

JEFF KOONS –– A RETROSPECTIVE SCOTT ROTHKOPF

–– With contributions by –– ANTONIO DAMASIO, JEFFREY DEITCH, ISABELLE GRAW, ACHIM HOCHDÖRFER, MICHELLE KUO, RACHEL KUSHNER, PAMELA M. LEE, AND ALEXANDER NAGEL

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK DISTRIBUTED BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

CONTENTS

FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

— Adam D. Weinberg ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

YORK TO NEW YORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 — Jeffrey Deitch

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LOVE AND BASKETBALL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 — Pamela M. Lee HAPPY HOUR, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP

NO LIMITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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— Scott Rothkopf

WORRYING AND LOVE THE MESSAGE . . . . . . . . . . 225 — Rachel Kushner LIFE AS A RESOURCE: Mythologization, Self-Marketing, and the Creation

INFLATABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

of Value in the Work of Jeff Koons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 — Isabelle Graw

PRE-NEW / THE NEW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45 THE GIFT OF ART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

EQUILIBRIUM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

— Achim Hochdörfer

LUXURY AND DEGRADATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

DESIGNS FOR LIVING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 — Antonio Damasio

STATUARY / KIEPENKERL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 OBJECTS THAT ARE ONLY BOUNDARIES . . . . . . . . 243 BANALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

— Alexander Nagel

MADE IN HEAVEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

ONE OF A KIND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 — Michelle Kuo

CELEBRATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 EASYFUN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 EASYFUN-ETHEREAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

POPEYE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

SELECTED EXHIBITION HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

HULK ELVIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

ANTIQUITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

LENDERS TO THE EXHIBITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

GAZING BALL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294

NO LIMITS –– SCOTT ROTHKOPF

THE MOST

proved too confining; Koons is “the most subversive artist alive today” or “one of the art world’s most famous and controversial figures.” 7 And in the eyes of at least one writer, his achievement could not rightly be limited to the “art world,” when the whole world might be a more fitting stage for “one of the most famous and popular artists on this planet.” 8 One imagines that if the presence of extraterrestrial life is ever definitively confirmed, this frame might expand further still.

Such superlatives cut both ways. Koons has also been dubbed nothing less than “the most active participant in the debasement of art.” 9 And even the effusive examples cited above were not always proffered as praise, nor would those that were be universally taken as such. As far as art and artists are concerned, shock, fame, expense, controversy, subversiveness, and ambition are certainly not accepted unanimously as virtues. Finally, it must be said that not one of these claims (apart from the Balloon Dog’s auction record) could be verified as true.

They may be hyperbole, opinion, generalization, mutually negating, or some combination thereof. But my point in marshaling these assertions is not to test their veracity so much as to marvel at the fact that Koons prompted their existence — in such great number, on such diverse topics, and over such a long period of time. At the risk of another hyperbolic generalization, I’d wager that no artist of the past thirty years has inspired more mosts. This alone is enough to make Koons worth thinking about. But what exactly makes him such an exceptional case?

Koons, I would argue, has been such a durable and ineluctable force in the art world in part because he has tested its limits and those of what art and an artist can be. Picture the field of contemporary artistic production as a vast terrain, the porous perimeter of which is marked by numerous stakes circumscribed by an elastic cord.

Each post represents the outer limit of a term or condition germane to art making today — exhibition practice, the market, the readymade, narrative, craft or industrial fabrication, an artist’s sincerity or cunning, the inheritance of Pop or Minimalism, or the explosion of celebrity and hype, among many more. Although these terms or

From the beginning, Jeff Koons provoked superlatives.

Mere adjectives seemed insufficient to describe the jolt of his art — and soon him. As early as 1983, just three years after his public debut, critic Roberta Smith described his work’s “presence” as “one of the strangest and most unique of contemporary art practice,” and only months later, poet Alan Jones declared that practice “one of the most consistent programs of high voltage art-making going on today.” 1 By the end of the decade, Koons was hailed as the “most incisive commentator” of the age, as well as “the hottest young artist in America” and the maker of its “most shocking art.” 2 This last sentiment was given personal resonance in 1993 by Robert Rosenblum, who wrote, “Koons is certainly the artist who has most upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the last decade.” 3 That the veteran art historian could compare this disturbance to his initial encounter with the art of Jasper Johns, which he had been among the first to champion, makes these words even more — or perhaps the most — forceful.

The list goes on: “the ultimate entrepreneur of the new art market” (a year after his solo gallery debut in 1985); “one of the world’s most bankable artists” (just six years later); the producer of “the most expensive art work by a living artist ever to sell at auction” (in 2013, when Balloon Dog [Orange] broke the record a different Koons sculpture had set once before).4 Writing of another of Koons’s canines, critic Jerry Saltz lauded Puppy as “the most purely pleasurable public sculpture I’ve ever seen,” while New Yorker columnist Peter Schjeldahl called it “hands down, the most richly and subtly painterly sculpture ever made.” These remarks seem modest when compared to those of Susan Freedman, the president of New York’s Public Art Fund, who extolled the topiary terrier as “one of the most significant sculptures of the twentieth century.” 5 Koons himself has been called “the most influential” and “arguably the most important” artist of his generation, as well as “the most misunderstood.” 6 Yet for some this generational context has

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No Limits

conditions predated Koons, in each case he moved the stakes farther out on the field, expanding the boundary in which all art occurs. We now — for better or worse — all stand within that distended arena. Koons struck down old limits and established new ones that are often impossible for his successors to attain, much less supersede, which is not to suggest they should aspire to. Some might try; some might know better; others might turn their backs on this periphery entirely. But still it remains in mind, a frontier borderland, both mythic and real, alluring and forbidding, full of risk and reward.

A retrospective such as the one this catalogue accompanies offers a chance to take full measure of an artist’s work. Although Koons has been the subject of many exhibitions bringing together the multifarious parts of his oeuvre, none has attempted to assemble them into as comprehensive a narrative since the one organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992, just thirteen years into a career that now spans nearly thrice that number. In charting Koons’s lifework, the present exhibition resituates his many icons within the context of the complex and multifaceted series in which they originated, and also demonstrates how those series might together form a cohesive if diverse whole.

The plate section that forms the core of this volume suggests the arc of that narrative, adhering to the unusually precise rubric by which Koons has organized his bodies of work. Each series is accompanied by an appendix of sorts that elaborates a constellation of reference points: process images, source material, and installation photographs. The plates are followed by a series of essays that are intended not to recapitulate the totality of this story, which has been recounted elsewhere, but rather to illuminate various aspects of Koons’s practice and the disparate contexts in which it might be considered.10 To that end, their authors represent a wide range of disciplines, from scholars and critics of Renaissance and contemporary art to a novelist and a neuroscientist. Taken together, they offer a sense of Koons’s broad reverberations within the realm of art and beyond.

Few artists, living or dead, have had such reach.

My aim in this essay is to examine that scope through a series of interrelated case studies hinged on the sensibilities Koons has challenged, the high wires he has traversed, the conceptual gambits he has offered, and the peerless objects on which these maneuvers depend.

It is impossible in the space provided here to offer a comprehensive account of Koons’s achievement and influence, the latter being particularly difficult to assess given that his singular example can be daunting to emulate and even, at times, a cautionary tale. Koons has pushed art’s limits, sometimes to uncomfortable ends. He has

Untitled etching from Koons’s undergraduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, 1974

challenged the art world’s critical pieties, and in the process has been described both as a symptom of our age and as one of its architects. Saying as much risks aligning him with some of the less salubrious forces at play in the art world and the world beyond, two spheres he has consistently endeavored to enmesh. Early in his career he spoke of the contemporary artist’s limited cultural power relative to that of the pop star or the designer of a Baroque church — a narrow purview that he hoped his work might transcend.11 He has certainly done this, in part through his individual artworks, and in part through his personal and professional conduct. It is impossible to deny that Koons’s art and career stand as a series of limit cases, and this, finally, may be what matters about him most.

ART AND THINGS

One could tell nearly the whole story of Koons’s art — and of the art of the past century more generally — through the lens of the readymade, so it makes a good place to begin. Since Marcel Duchamp first exhibited his urinal in 1917, few artists have been as associated with that gesture or have grappled with it as variously as has Koons. At one extreme, he has displayed unadulterated found objects as his own, and at the other, he has made painstaking replicas of such things. Between those poles he has explored so many approaches to the readymade that we could say it acts as a kind of lodestar in Koons’s practice, even when he seems to stray from its light. This wasn’t always the case. As a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, Koons primarily made neo-Surrealist paintings of dream imagery, some

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Scott Rothkopf

veering toward nightmares featuring brightly colored severed limbs. If these paintings were indebted to the imagined concoctions of Koons’s hero Salvador Dalí and to his Chicago Imagist teachers Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt, and Ed Paschke, Koons recalls that even then Paschke urged him to turn outward, revealing to the young artist “that everything is already here in the world and you just have to look for it.” 12

In November 1976 Koons set forth. He heard the siren song of New York emanating from the radio — in the voice of Patti Smith — and he hitchhiked there the next day. Shortly after relocating in January 1977, he got a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art, where he remembers encountering a broad new range of aesthetic ideas, including the post-Minimal sculpture of Robert Smithson and Jackie Winsor, the Photoconceptualism of Bill Beckley, and the objects displayed in the galleries of architecture and design. The New York art world of the late 1970s was awash in pluralism, with a multitude of options yet to be codified according to the more decisive ideologies and battle lines of the decade to come. Koons explored the Punk and New Wave music scenes at CBGB and the Mudd Club, and he met fellow artists Julian Schnabel and David Salle, the latter of whom was a link to the emerging “Pictures Generation.” 13 This group, which included Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, was rekindling conversations around the readymade via the appropriation of found imagery and would be credited with interrogating and subverting the power of media images while leaving them largely intact. In retrospect, however, much of their work’s energy derives from the sex appeal and magnetism of the material it purportedly critiqued, an irony that was not lost on Koons, who began to exploit found objects of a similar if distinct species to even more alluring ends.

Cumulatively, these various exposures and contacts had a chilling and hardening effect on Koons’s nascent art. It became less expressive, more Pop, more deadpan, more directed toward the outer world than the inner one. His hand would never be evident in his work again.

Koons has long accorded Duchamp pride of place in this shift: “My process of distancing myself from subjective art continued through the late ’70s, which included exposure to Marcel Duchamp. He seemed the total opposite of the subjective art I had been immersed in. It was the most objective statement possible, the readymade.” 14 At first, Koons pursued this new interest in the readymade in elaborate sculptures and wall reliefs made from colorful inflatable toys, figurines, and tacky synthetic trimmings that he purchased on Fourteenth Street, Broadway, and the Lower East Side and used to turn his East Village apartment into a riotous installation (no. 6, p. 43). He

Hanging Double-Sided Mirror with Wall Mirror and Inflatable Flowers (Tall Yellow, Tall Purple), 1978. Vinyl, mirrors, and plastic, approx. 26 x 12 x 18 in. (66 x 30.5 x 45.7 cm)

soon pared down this baroque vocabulary, positioning the inflatable flora and fauna in sparer arrangements against mirrored and transparent acrylic tiles in sculptures that forged a perverse marriage of Pop and Minimalism (pls. 1, 2, 4, 5). Some of these works survive, but most served as ephemeral setups to be photographed and rearranged, a strategy he borrowed from Conceptual art. Koons’s first mature works certainly resonate with those of his aforementioned contemporaries and of Haim Steinbach, who was then also vigorously engaged with the readymade.15 Koons’s sculptures, however, are distinguished by their cheery if impersonal affect (long before the neo-Pop mania of the East Village scene) and by their greater sense of physical contingency, both of which have remained hallmarks of his art. The mirrors reflect their surroundings and viewers, while the inflatable toys embody a sense of life implicitly shadowed by the threat of detumescence. In Koons’s hands, the readymade became, over the next three decades, an improbable poetic vehicle through which to conjure states of equilibrium and instability, fullness and emptiness, joy and disgust, life and death — the prosaic objects of the outer world made lapidary mirrors of our inner ones.

In 1979 Koons began a series of wall reliefs comprising store-bought appliances, such as a toaster and deep fryer, attached to fluorescent fixtures before which they appear magically to float (pls. 6–9). These works, like all of Koons’s sculptures, are not strictly speaking readymades, since they involve the combination of multiple

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No Limits

elements. But in contrast to the tradition of assemblage, they so insistently foreground a banal and unadulterated thing — pushing it before us, bathing it in light — that they retrieve something of the raw force latent in Duchamp’s initial gesture. Their subjects are objects. Humble yet endowed with an aura of reverent fascination, they reimagine traditional still lifes for the General Electric age.

Nevertheless, Koons still worried that his chosen products had been too manipulated — violated, even — in the process of being bolted to their supports. He feared he “wasn’t preserving the integrity of the object,” a problem he sought to obviate in his breakthrough series, The New.16 This body of work also began with luminous reliefs (this time featuring vacuum cleaners), but now the appliances were left completely unmolested (pls. 10–12).

Koons soon made this purity more evident by presenting the machines forever sealed from the world in freestanding, lambent, acrylic cases that preserve and intensify the vacuums’ virginal state (pls. 15–18, 21, 22). As with Duchamp’s urinal, these products have clear anthropomorphic and sexual associations, with pliant trunks, sucking orifices, and bags that inflate and deflate like lungs.

Most important, however, is their aura of newness, which remains almost paradoxically everlasting even as they age within their aseptic incubators. Like insects trapped in amber or specimens pickled in formaldehyde, they become emblems of immortality as well as its inverse.

We could say that Koons’s fascination with the readymade is really an outgrowth of his fascination with things, particularly those made by industry to enhance and accessorize our lives, along with the advertising images meant to convince us of this effect. Accordingly, the principal sculptural problem of his career up until 1984 was one of presentation: how to involve these inviolate objects in artworks as compelling as the products they comprised, how to catch them like fireflies in jars that might set off rather than extinguish their inner light.17 His emphasis was on amplifying an object’s quiddity — its “voice,” he would say — through a framing device even more puissant than a pedestal or an artist’s incantatory designation of an object as art. Koons has attributed this sensitivity to childhood memories of the displays and wares of his father’s home decor store, Henry J. Koons Decorators, where he witnessed firsthand the power of merchandise to tell stories and seduce.18 Later in his career, the artist’s approach to found objects would take on a messianic tone, with Koons declaring that the readymade carried a message of acceptance, because things are perfect just as we find them, and he therefore took great pains not to screw them up. One visitor to his Chelsea apartment in 1980 recalls confronting a complete Pullman-style kitchen unit standing in an otherwise empty living room,

its owner paralyzed with uncertainty as to how to improve upon its readymade perfection.19

Koons arrived at the most extreme manifestation of this presentational strategy in his 1985 exhibition Equilibrium at the East Village gallery International With Monument (nos. 1, 2, p. 72). He conceived the show as a multilayered allegory concerning unattainable “states of being,” with basketballs levitating inside aquarium tanks, cast flotation devices that would kill rather than save, and a group of unaltered Nike basketball posters whose stars he saw as “sirens” beckoning young people (especially African Americans) with the promise of social mobility (pls. 23–32).20 The posters, in particular, hewed more closely than ever to Duchamp’s model and upped the ante in the then high-stakes game of appropriation art. Critic Alan Jones remarked at the time that they “teeter dangerously at the outer limits of found imagery,” a high compliment given how increasingly difficult aesthetic peril and boundaries are to find.21 I’d hazard that the danger — and discovery — here comes from the weird compulsion one feels to locate in these posters some telltale evidence of the artist’s effort, which is hardly an impulse elicited at this late date by Duchamp’s shovel. We keep imagining that they can’t be just posters, that Koons must have done something other than simply put them in frames, and this perplexity owes in part to the fact that they haven’t undergone the aesthetic ennoblement of obvious misuse. Duchamp at least had the decency to emphasize his transmutative powers by using a urinal or shovel other than as they were intended (which is to say as sculpture), but the Nike posters function precisely as they should (which is to say hanging on a wall, awaiting our regard). Koons did, indeed, bring the readymade to its “outer limits,” reclaiming for it a confusion and danger by doing so little with it, by designating a printed thing already so physically art-like as art. This tension recurs throughout his subsequent career, from his repurposed figurines to his casts of casts of classical sculptures (pls. 130–34).

Precisely as Koons arrived at this limit, his engagement with the readymade began to shift from the problem of presentation to that of representation. It was as though in whittling the former approach to the quick, he was compelled to push off in the latter direction. In this sense, the Equilibrium series can be seen as a pivot that contains both Koons’s purest readymades and his first experiments with ersatz ones, which led him to be grouped with a number of his contemporaries under the banner of “simulation art.” 22 Examples include the cast-bronze Aqualung, Lifeboat, and Snorkel Vest, all of which confer a state of permanent inflatedness on their otherwise unstable subjects (pls. 27, 32). Here the

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Scott Rothkopf

Showroom in the decorating store of Jeff’s father, Henry Koons, York, Pennsylvania

casting process supplants framing or display as Koons’s chief editorial inflection, so that the replicated products elegantly contain within themselves a new metaphorical surplus: The heavy material that grants his flotation devices eternal life also makes them baleful imagoes.

They feel at once distant from our world yet strikingly present in it, performing their metamorphosis from useful objects to symbolic ones.

A similar operation is at play in Koons’s subsequent two series, Luxury and Degradation and Statuary (pls.

33–51), but here he turned away from Duchamp’s and his own precedent of selecting merely useful objects (a shovel, a raft) in favor of those distinguished not by “what they are for” but by “who they are for,” in curator John Caldwell’s pithy phrasing. A Baccarat crystal set and a collectible porcelain train full of bourbon are both vessels for holding alcohol. Yet, as Caldwell observed of Koons’s new subjects, “Their primary quality is their appeal, their look, their design, instead of the work they are expected to perform, and thus they are highly charged and meant to fulfill emotional and psychological needs or desires.” 23 Koons threw these attributes into

high relief by casting his models in glistening stainless steel, a material that makes them even more enchanting and literally reflective of their covetous consumers.

Robbed of its use value, a leather travel bar replete with bottles and implements becomes a compacted allegory of attainment, vice, and dying customs while evoking the aspiring gentleman who might once have carried it (or longed to). There is a brutal chill about these works, a sense of capitalism’s cheering fictions laid bare. They were made in New York during the mid-1980s, a place and a time in which such nakedness had lost its embarrassment. The ice cubes hit the steel tumblers with a stultifying clang rather than a gratifying ting.

Koons has a sixth sense for making ordinary things blossom into archetypes. His secret, at the time, lay in his ability to harmonize the specific and the generic in both his selection of subjects and his casting of them.

With regard to the former, he is a connoisseur of objects that suggest a kind of thing but not anything in particular. Italian Woman, for example, typifies a certain kind of art from a certain time without being a recognizable masterpiece (pl. 47). Many viewers will identify Bob Hope

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No Limits

as the subject of one of Koons’s sculptures (pl. 45), but few will know its specific source (no. 3, p. 96). This quality is intensified by virtue of Koons’s casting. On the one hand, his sculptures are so replete in their fine detail that they suggest their models’ original materials and draw us into a slow delectation of their precisely articulated parts.

On the other, they lack particularities, such as color, that might localize or limit a viewer’s associations. The tension between the Rabbit’s blank face and its minute modeling is a key to the sculpture’s mesmerizing capacity to incite and absorb our seemingly limitless projections (pl. 49). It is a faceless orator, a helmeted spaceman, a Playboy Bunny, a totem of Resurrection. Like all the works in Statuary, it is also a representation of a representation: a sculpture of a toy in the guise of a rabbit.24 Indeed, if Koons had begun his love affair with the readymade by presenting real things, then shifted to depicting them, he was now representing real things representing other things — a double remove that catches within its crosshairs the infrathin distinction between an object and a work of art.

After Statuary, the readymade vanished from Koons’s art for nearly two decades. He has attributed this absence to a traumatic experience in 1987 while making Kiepenkerl, which he conceived as a perfect stainless-steel replica of a beloved bronze statue in Münster that depicts a folk-hero peddler (pl. 52). The work was badly damaged during casting and required last-minute “radical plastic surgery” before its debut in the city’s prestigious decennial sculpture exhibition (nos. 20, 22, p. 99) — an episode, he recalls, that liberated him from a slavish adherence to found objects, which in turn freed him from casting in metal.25 But with his Popeye series, begun in 2002, the readymade resurfaced with mindboggling vehemence (pls. 106 –13). Now, rather than transmogrify a found object into a sculpture by conspicuously translating it from one material into another, Koons sought to conceal this metamorphosis entirely behind a faultless similitude rarely achieved in the history of art.

The cast-aluminum and hand-painted menagerie of pool toys that populate this body of work are stunning feats of artifice, exhibiting crimps and puckers along their seams so carefully rendered they would make even those of Rabbit seem downright primitive. This trompe l’oeil quality is heightened by the laborious paint handling that perfectly emulates the subtle textural distinctions of the original floats, from their lustrous vinyl to their matte printing to their glossy handles and valves. These works, of course, draw on a lineage that dates from Johns’s ale cans and Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes to similarly deceptive sculptures by the likes of Robert Gober and Peter Fischli and David Weiss.26 Yet close attention to any of these precedents reveals them to be something other

than what they purport, and their meaning as artworks derives in part from the way the artist, while cleverly aping industry, always shows his hand.

Koons’s surfaces, by contrast, never give away the game, although, as we have seen, he is equally interested in the problem of representation. Each work in Popeye and the subsequent series, Hulk Elvis, is a meditation on the essence of depiction, a point emphasized

by Koons’s frequent use of doubling, as in the pair of inflatables in Seal Walrus (Trashcans) (pl. 111). We would never know that Koons’s indefectible doppelgängers are not the real thing were they not often juxtaposed with real things that both challenge and heighten their illusionism. A hanging chain of inflatable monkeys, for example, supports a wooden chair that would otherwise topple the group, while the duo of inflatable seals hold their pressure despite being penetrated by a pair of metal trashcans. Such miraculous feats might be mere sight gags were they not so crucial to these sculptures’ reflexive concern with mimesis. That the toys appear to maintain their buoyancy — their rictus grins in the face of harm — only augments their preternatural sense of lifelikeness. This is nowhere truer than in Hulk (Rock), where a flawlessly rendered life-size inflatable Hulk supports a marble boulder on his shoulders (pl. 118). Befitting its subject, the figure exudes a supernatural poise, and the more one looks at it, the more one starts to wonder whether, in fact, the rock might be fake and the Hulk might be real (a double take elicited by other works featuring natural elements such as logs and flowers). But it is the very notion of the “real” that Koons seems bent on probing through sculptures that act as taut semantic puzzles, appealing at once to our perceptual and logical faculties. These works traffic in the confrontation and confusion between the authentic and the delusive, the manufactured and the handcrafted, the durable and the evanescent, the cheery and the brutal, the natural and the made.

It is perhaps ironic that the readymade, a century after its birth, would come to this — a dead ringer for a polka-dotted inflatable marine mammal. After all, Duchamp revealed that the only essential ingredient of an artwork is an artist’s designation of it as such, while Koons’s recent clones are the result of countless hours and dexterous hands. And if Duchamp claimed that he selected his objects because of his indifference to them, Koons chooses his precisely for their narrative and emotional charge. But we could also say that with these sculptures the readymade has come full circle, and so has Koons. Already for the Pop artists of the 1960s the readymade served less as a strict model than as a conceptual license to translate the dross of the everyday

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world into art via handmade if deadpan representations of comic books and ads. Koons has pushed their precedent to an absurdly logical conclusion, both upping and vanishing their manual investment, while closing the loop from the found object to its facsimile. A work like Liberty Bell (pl. 121), which perfectly imitates its subject in exactly the same materials as the original, achieves the dream of an “objective” art that set Koons on his early path from the presentation to the representation of found things. Indeed, if the readymade absolves the artist of every subjective decision (apart from the choice of object and the mode of display), so, too, does the aim of assiduous replication.27 Koons may be Duchamp’s greatest student or his greatest misinterpreter. He looked to old-fashioned values like labor, skill, and illusionism in order to turn the readymade on its head, making it strange and forcefully new again.

Italian Woman; on the latter lie the shrunken Bob Hope and the ribald Doctor’s Delight. Koons amplified and scrambled this distinction by casting all his sources in stainless steel, which he prized for its sense of “proletarian luxury.” 29 Yet, ironically, it was this metal most common to appliances that turned his lowbrow sources into highbrow art. Just imagine these sculptures in bronze and you’ll get a sense of Koons’s gift for materials. While that alloy worked for the transubstantiation of a snorkel, it would not have done the trick on a mermaid troll, since bronze is just the sort of fine-art medium on which kitsch purveyors prey. Only a double negative could raise these tchotchkes up the ladder of cultural value.

This phrasing brings us to the worn terrain of high and low, a dichotomy that — no matter how contested, abraded, and possibly outmoded it may seem — remains a handy and intuitive gauge.30 By now we stand neck deep in brackish water from the confluence of those two currents, and Koons has played a signal role in the recent history of their admixture. The 1980s represented a high-water mark in this process, with artists such as Julia Wachtel, Kenny Scharf, and Koons’s early dealer Meyer Vaisman exploring hokey cartoon imagery in New York, while on the West Coast Mike Kelley plumbed the infernal depths of suburban childhood and even turned to stuffed animals around the same time that Koons did.

These artists, like Koons, were indebted to the American Pop masters of the 1960s, though the earlier generation tended to work with materials and formats that might elevate their pop-cultural samplings more decisively into the realm of art. (Warhol’s silkscreening of found images, however, does rhyme with Koons’s doublenegative strategy.) Furthermore, despite their fondness for movies and product packaging, these earlier artists tended not to get too mixed up with kitsch, a term that doesn’t really apply to things like advertising and comic books, which demonstrate no pretense toward being anything other than the mass-cultural artifacts they are.

Koons went to the scarier heart of the matter with his 1988 series Banality, which he unveiled almost simultaneously at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Donald Young in Chicago, and Max Hetzler in Cologne (no. 8, p. 115). After his experience with Kiepenkerl freed him from his readymade sources, he was able to unleash his connoisseur’s eye for kitsch with even greater abandon, creating sculptural mash-ups based on stuffed animals, Capodimonte and Hummel figurines, plush toys, and imagery purloined from magazines, greeting cards, product packaging, advertisements, films, and even Leonardo da Vinci (pls. 57, 68). Nothing was too corny, too cloying, too cute. In fact, by enlarging his sources and rendering them in suspect materials such as

STANDARDS OF TASTE

Koons’s interest in the readymade developed hand-inhand with his fascination for two general classes of stuff: industrially made objects with and without a practical function. Early in his career he largely devoted himself to the former, but Luxury and Degradation witnessed a shift in emphasis, as useful things such as pails and ice buckets began to commingle with less useful ones like miniature automobiles and train sets full of bourbon.

Based on a porcelain and plastic collectible, Jim Beam — J. B. Turner Train brilliantly encapsulates this distinction, since Koons claimed that the work would be destroyed if the bourbon inside were ever consumed—an action that would literally turn the sculpture into a used good (pl. 40).28 But the train is haunted by another threat to art that here is held elegantly if tenuously at bay: the specter of kitsch. The term is a highly loaded one, fraught with specific and pernicious historical associations. We might use it in this context to describe things that seem like art but aren’t, the tacky images and gewgaws that decorate our lives and play to our emotions without challenging them. If art is an icebreaker that opens new and unknown channels of thought, kitsch sails in its wake, exploiting the lowest common denominator of received ideas.

Koons’s refined eye for such unrefined pictures and trinkets was put keenly to use in Statuary, a term that itself suggests a borderland just outside the domain of sculpture (pls. 45 – 51). If Luxury and Degradation took as its subjects useful and useless things (and those midway between), Statuary’s tension lay in the duality between figurative objects that might and might not properly be called art. On the former side, we find Louis XIV and

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in the eponymous carving Ushering in Banality (pl. 53).

The masterpiece of the series is surely the gilded porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles, which portrays the King of Pop and his pet chimpanzee garbed in matching band uniforms and surrounded by an offering of delicate blossoms (pl. 63). Based on an iconic publicity photograph, the sculpture serves as the conceptual lynchpin of Banality, interlacing its themes and linking them directly to the contemporary world. In person, the work never ceases to startle. Drawing on the tradition of heroic portrait statuary and befitting the renown of his subject, Koons rendered the pair at larger-than-life-size.

Yet the scale is discomfiting for the depiction of such passive recumbency, and so is Jackson’s rouged alabaster skin. If many of the series’ other sculptures rely on stock characters or treat in generic terms bromides such as human affection for cuddly creatures, here Banality’s motifs are lent vivid, disturbing credence—right down to the artist’s identification with his subject. “If I could be one other living person,” Koons remarked at the time, “it would probably be Michael Jackson.” 33 With his own fame ascendant, the artist repeatedly marveled at the superstar’s ability to communicate with such a broad public and, one imagines, at his ability to pioneer artistic innovation within a pop genre. Koons even praised Jackson’s willingness to remake himself surgically to become more palatable to a white middle-class audience. “That’s radicality. That’s abstraction,” Koons declared. “I’m much more interested in that kind of abstraction than in any formalist idea.” 34

But by 1988, Jackson was on the cusp of ghoulishness and desperation. His greatest albums were behind him; his medical skin lightening had begun; and his emotional bond to his animal companion betrayed his inability to form an intimate human one (a cathexis eerily redoubled in Koons’s sculpture by Bubbles’s grip on his blanket). Koons captured all this with a synthetic brilliance, casting the duo as a pietà for an age when pop stars inspire truly religious fervor. Of course, it was the singer, not the chimp, whose passion Koons prefigured.

In contrast to the source image, he turned Jackson’s head to avert our gaze, lending him a beatific humility and childlike innocence. Over time, the singer’s features grew even closer to those of the sculpture, and his premature death in 2009 took on a dimension of Christian sacrifice. The work is a marvel of prolepsis. Rarely in art history do a subject, a form, a material, and a moment so potently entwine.

Once unveiled in New York, Banality caused a sensation the likes of which the art world had not experienced in decades. Reliable curmudgeon Hilton Kramer opined that the show “really does carry things to a new low,”

Publicity image of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, c. 1985

polychromed wood and gilt porcelain — with the help, respectively, of Oberammergau wood carvers and Italian ceramicists — Koons made the treacly monstrous and malevolent. He even had these craftsmen sign his sculptures, a mark of canned originality few high-minded artists had employed since the days of Barnett Newman.

For all this apparent omnivorous recklessness, as with his previous bodies of work, Koons conceived Banality as a finely calibrated allegory, this one aimed at exculpating us from our most unreconstructed tastes. It was OK, he insisted, not to put away our childish things, whether they were the plush toys of the county fair or the curios perched on our grandparents’ shelves. “In the Banality series I started to focus on my dialogue about people accepting their own histories,” he later explained. “I was just trying to say that whatever you respond to is perfect, that your history and your own cultural background are perfect.” 31 Koons’s gospel of absolution involved a pair of defanged serpents from the Garden of Eden, John the Baptist to christen us in banality, and a doleful Buster Keaton as Christ entering Jerusalem attended by the Holy Spirit in the form of a cartoon birdie (pl. 54). Summoning prelapsarian innocence, a silky-skinned nude girl and boy gaze at a heartshaped anthurium with an enormous phallic spadix, while bodacious babes conjure an unrepentant id (pls.

60–62).32 The smiling Winter Bears and mawkish Amore and Popples beckon with open arms like family members one shrinks from at a reunion (pl. 55; nos. 17, 20, p. 117). It’s creepy and unbecoming to want to be liked so much, but Koons urges his viewers to get over their ingrained decorum and acquired shame. He was even willing to debase himself in this emancipatory narrative, appearing as a boy prodding a pig attended by angels

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while Arthur C. Danto marveled that it raised “a question that I thought long dead: Is it (is IT) art?” Veteran critic Sidney Tillim described “the hysterical critical reaction” as “unlike anything I can remember since the advent of Pop Art in 1961– 62.” And Adam Gopnik concurred, observing that Banality “shocked people who claimed not to have been shocked by anything at all since the early sixties, and caused a scandal of a sort that was . . . almost touching in its re-creation of an earlier and more embattled era in the history of modern art.” 35 It is, in retrospect, touching and even hard to fathom that fewer than three decades ago an entire art community could be outraged by a ceramic doll holding a pot of jam, but this response, as we will see, was fueled by factors such as Koons’s rising prices and celebrity. It is also inspiring.

What is remarkable about these sculptures almost thirty years later is that they remain nearly as problematic — dare I say vulgar? — as when they were first made. I mean this as high praise. The aesthetic affront of early Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, by comparison, has congealed into elegance, as has the Minimalism of Carl Andre and Donald Judd, which once challenged taste and now represents the height of tastefulness.

The same could not be said of Koons’s Banality sculptures or of many of those that followed. I have seen his beaming Winter Bears and frowning Popples in tony residences, and each encounter comes as a shock. They look aggressive and out of place, bigger and more garish than they should, their scabrous surfaces vaguely repellent. They never seem quite at home in the homes of their owners, nor in the museums their owners support. Koons’s art rarely feels chic the way that even the toughest objects by Sherrie Levine or Christopher Wool can. It seldom matches the sofa. Stylishness or the lack thereof is neither an absolute positive value nor a negative one; it changes with the times and without direct correlation to art-historical significance. But Koons’s work remains impressively resistant to that trait. It tests our jaded open-mindedness. Unlike most once-transgressive art, it has retained over decades a concussive power, a capacity to perturb and revolt. Looking at it in the present, one still senses its original sin.

stars in gossip items, on Twitter feeds, and in fashion ads, while their art, lives, and prices are chronicled with the same ardor and snark once reserved for more runof-the-mill celebrities. If Jackson Pollock’s appearance in Life (or his paintings’ appearance as backdrops in Vogue) once caused surprise and consternation, today such images would scarcely raise an eyebrow or sell a magazine.36 Precedents in the modern era for this celebrity treatment run back at least to Gustave Courbet’s star turn in Parisian pamphlets, and in the last century the first true art stars were arguably Dalí and Warhol.37 With unprecedented marketing savvy, they forged new modes of self-presentation that made them, as much as their art, fodder for media consumption. Yet it was not until the mid-1980s that less eccentric figures joined in, as artists came to be treated more like personalities than visitors from some rarefied foreign realm. The explosion of the 1980s art market and the downtown New York club scene launched not just a roster of “art stars” but also an era of media fascination with them that continues today. And no artist has come to exemplify that condition more acutely than Koons, whose Google news alerts arrive daily with word of his exhibitions, prices, corporate collaborations, and appearances alongside the likes of Hillary Clinton, Lady Gaga, and Muhammad Ali. 38

Although Koons’s critical buzz had grown during the early 1980s, he didn’t gain real media traction until 1986, when he and fellow artists Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, and Vaisman made the much-ballyhooed leap from International With Monument to the prominent SoHo perch of Sonnabend, earning them the epithet “The Hot Four” on the cover of New York magazine.39 Two years later Koons separated himself from the pack with the sensation of Banality. The series’ tripartite international debut was more akin to a movie release than to the unveiling of a serious artist’s work, but it can be taken as a shrewd commentary on the new place of artists in the celebrity and market firmament, long before Damien Hirst pushed that point with his concurrent 2012 shows of spot paintings at Gagosian Gallery’s eleven global outposts.

Appropriately enough, Koons announced his new body of work with a group of glamorous art-magazine ads in which he fashioned himself a pop star with the help of commercial photographer Greg Gorman (nos.

4, 6, p. 114; no. 14, p. 116; no. 19, p. 117). Although the ads ostensibly trumpeted a trio of exhibitions, they in fact promoted the artist himself as a new kind of celebrity, seen lecturing to adoring children or surrounded by bikini-clad babes — a mode of self-presentation that perfectly emblematized the social status that artists had only lately attained. These images can be seen as a kind

SUPERNOVA Banality made Koons the superstar we know him to be today. By now we take his fascinating and problematic status as such for granted, just as we are more generally inured to contemporary artists’ place in the endlessly expanding media universe. They figure alongside actors, athletes, rappers, socialites, politicians, and reality-TV

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of performance art in their own right, drawing on a long line of advertisements in which artists exaggerated and spoofed their sex appeal, whether Ed Ruscha lolling in bed with two women, Lynda Benglis leaning confidently against a Porsche, or Robert Morris posing as a muscleman.40 Sporting a bathrobe and surrounded by circus animals, Koons too gave his ads a parodic edge, since he resembles a clown as much as a matinee idol, a perfect spokesman for the series’ conjoined themes of innocence and debasement. But Koons’s images differ from their DIY precedents in that he marshaled Hollywood’s marketing machinery to present himself as the kind of icon that he — unlike his predecessors — would actually soon become. In daring to work with the very mythmakers an “advanced artist” is presumed to oppose, he snared the publicity apparatus directly within his frame, challenging the myths that apparatus generates as well as an artist’s equally mythic innocence of them.

Koons, however, was not content to play a star in the art rags when he could play — or better yet, be — one in real life. As if a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, his paid announcements were closely followed by appearances on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and inside People, as he grew increasingly preoccupied with reaching an even greater audience.41 “How effective are art stars?” Koons asked interviewer Matthew Collings in 1989, before answering his own question. “Their glamour is pretty limited. . . . The only way artists can find their own glamour is to incorporate aspects of systems other than ‘art’ and to be creative and confident enough to really exploit what they have.” 42 A few months later, Koons struck on a way both to demonstrate that confidence and to engage a “system” far beyond the art world: a project entitled Made in Heaven, costarring the world-famous Hungarian-born porn star and Italian parliamentarian Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina.

Koons had initially spied Staller in 1988 in Stern magazine and had used her mesh-covered torso as a source for his Banality sculpture Fait d’hiver (pl. 61). He encountered her image again the following year on the cover of a men’s magazine, and he recalls being enthralled by her beauty and innocence, his sense that her total public acceptance of her sexuality made her “the eternal virgin.” 43 Invited by the Whitney Museum to create an outdoor billboard for Image World, a 1989 exhibition exploring the relationship between art and the media, Koons arranged to be photographed with Staller for an advertisement announcing a feature film he planned to make with her titled Made in Heaven. Koons traveled to Italy and contracted the starlet to pose on her own sets and be shot by her manager and frequent photographer, Riccardo Schicchi. Set against a tempestuous

Helmut Newton, Jeff Koons & Cicciolina, Italy, 1991. Gelatin silver print, 23 5⁄8 x 19 5⁄8 in. (60 x 50 cm). Edition of 3

backdrop atop a glistening boulder, a naked Koons clutches his costar’s lingerie-clad body while staring at the camera and, he seems to imagine, his legions of adoring fans. Seen from the streets of Manhattan, the billboard represented a particularly brazen form of selfpromotion. Neither a spokesperson nor a hired hand, as Warhol and Dalí ordinarily were in the realm of advertising, Koons cast himself as a bona fide star with an even more famous heroine, claiming his proper place in the network of publicity and mass attention that many artists had long coveted while pretending to scorn.

With this indelible image, Koons launched a media blitz and a body of work that grew increasingly entwined and, ultimately, indistinguishable. Captivated by his muse and the implicit promise of his new project (to say nothing of his own burgeoning celebrity), Koons returned with Staller to the studio to make more photographs, the first three of which were photomechanically painted on large canvases and unveiled in the summer of 1990 at the Venice Biennale (no. 2, p. 132). He spoke of this work in evangelical tones as a kind of extension of the Banality series. If those sculptures were intended to help viewers overcome the embarrassment of their bourgeois taste, then these images of a contemporary Adam and Eve would remove the shame of nakedness and sex, leading to total self-acceptance.44 The Venice vernissage also served as the public debut for the personal relationship

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that had developed between Koons and Staller, who arrived daily at the installation in Vegas-worthy getups to tongue kiss before legions of paparazzi in front of their graven images (exhibiting an exposed vulva and flaccid penis). Had Koons merely taken up with an infamous porn star, he no doubt would have caused a stir; and had he merely posed naked with a model, he would have likely caused an even greater stir. But the fact that this naked model was both a porn star and his lover blurred the lines between art, life, and the media to such an extent that the then ubiquitous theorizing on the relationships among them seemed suddenly beside the point.45

As summer turned to fall, more than two hundred media outlets announced Koons and Staller’s engagement from Helsinki to Akron. That the local paper in Sedalia, Missouri, deemed the story of interest to the town’s 19,800 denizens provides some measure of the depth of Koons’s media penetration, as does the fact that the news often appeared alongside other Associated Press items featuring veritable stars like Madonna and Pavarotti. In January 1991 word leaked that the marriage was off, but by May it was on again, with a United Press International item picked up by the Fresno Bee claiming that Hungarian minister Zoltan Szirmai had agreed to perform Staller’s union with “American sculptor Jess Coon.” Official pictures of the June 1 nuptials in Budapest reached millions of readers via a staggering six hundred print sources worldwide.46 Although Koons could not (yet) have boasted a name as recognizable as Warhol’s, no artist had ever gained such a wide media presence by virtue of his or her personal affairs, just like a “real” celebrity could.

Koons went the next step that fall with exhibitions at Sonnabend and Hetzler that served as a multilayered Edenic allegory of sex and love (no. 4, p. 132; no. 8, p. 133). Panting wooden dogs were displayed alongside Murano glass figurines of the newlyweds in flagrante and sculptures of carved flowers with humanoid orifices, some in the midst of pollination by a hummingbird’s long bill (pls. 72, 75, 76, 80). What had been only implied in the relatively chaste Venice pictures was made explicit in a new group of canvases that featured the couple engaged in acts of oral, vaginal, and anal penetration (pls. 78, 79). In scenes that ranged from sensual to rough, Koons revealed a body transformed by his much-touted gym regime and a face covered with eye shadow and pancake makeup. The New York show caused a scandal besting that of Banality, with lines around the block and critics decrying the work as misogynist megalomania at the height of the AIDS crisis and culture wars, as well as at the depth of a post-crash art market whose peak Koons had epitomized.47 In retrospect, however, it is hard to

take these scenes as simply another affirmation of heterosexist male domination. After all, they portray a married couple, surrounded by gossamer butterflies peculiar to the wife’s corporate enterprise, with a husband risking everything in full-on maquillage. What makes these queer pictures still so riveting is their scrambling of normal social codes and their status not as porn but as selfportraiture — all in the name of a self-acceptance that no normal viewer could ever truly share. Even for Koons, the fever dream proved unsustainable, and within two years his relationship with Staller ended, at great human cost to both of the participants and to their child, Ludwig, who became the object of an acrimonious custody dispute and was eventually abducted by his mother. 48 Even today, a genuine sense of risk — that worrying flipside of freedom — remains part of the emotional atmosphere that Made in Heaven conjures. If it had all been a game, one imagines that Koons would have been more emotionally well armored.

Just before the Sonnabend exhibition opened, art historian Rosalind Krauss complained to the New York Times: “Artists’ interest in using the media against itself was formerly subversive and parodic, beginning with Dadaism. . . . Koons, on the other hand, is not exploiting the media for avant-garde purposes. He’s in cahoots with the media. . . . It’s self-advertisement, and I find that repulsive.” 49 Krauss’s revulsion is understandable, but her critical model failed to consider how drastically art’s relationship to the media had changed since the time of Dada, when artists had little risk (or hope) of being sucked up into the circuitry they mocked. To pretend that art and artists today are not bound up in this system is at best a false comfort and at worst a form of denial. Toying with the new world order, Koons exaggerated and upset the stability of the artist as a media figure and the figure of the media in an artist’s work. He did shine a critical light on the PR machine, and that light in part emanated from his own incendiary stardom, which has only continued to grow in concert with the number of outlets for it. We could say that Koons was art’s plant — a visitor from one realm to another who shockingly managed to take the promise (or threat) of artistic celebrity to its most extreme conclusion, while never letting us forget that he was foremost an artist, because the whole mad process was mirrored in his work. The media spectacle alone would have been only so interesting, and the work alone would have had more limited power. But it was the perfect, truly fearful symmetry he concocted between them that ensures Made in Heaven’s enduring relevance and vexing charge.

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VALUE SYSTEMS

lighted display systems designed to showcase art and consumer goods. This reciprocity was made abundantly clear when Koons debuted a selection of these works in 1980 in the window of the New Museum on Fourteenth Street, where confused passersby reportedly inquired whether the vacuums were for sale (no. 1, p. 58). 53 These series stressed the market economy’s cult of shiny newness, the next model put before buyers, the multiplicity of options that capitalism offers us to achieve the same ends — a cycle that the contemporary art system perpetuates in its unceasing stress on aesthetic innovation. Unlike Duchamp’s generic shovels and urinals, Koons’s chosen products are conspicuously linked to specific brands. Their makers’ logos and names — Hoover or Shelton — are emphasized on each appliance and in the title of each artwork, which could now also be called “a Jeff Koons,” the product having been borne from one market to another by virtue of a new maker’s mark.54

In his subsequent bodies of work, Luxury and Degradation and Statuary, Koons added yet another Möbius-like twist by taking commercial products already in the guise of collectible sculptures, such as Doctor’s Delight and the J. B. Turner Train, and magically transforming them into yet finer art by casting them in stainless steel. Koons spoke of the former series in particular as a parable of class attainment, expounding on the relationship of each of the sculptures and liquor ads to particular market segments (Baccarat crystal and Frangelico aimed at the rich; a pail and Bacardi for the poor).55 He linked the intoxication of the liquor that literally ran through the show to the dangers of overconsumption and manipulation by corporate concerns.

Yet as his prices gained steam, critics observed that his sculptures seemed to reflect their newfound status as market fetishes, grouping his work along with that of Bickerton, Steinbach, and Allan McCollum, among others, under the sobriquets of “commodity fetishism” and “commodity critique.” The jury was out as to whether Koons’s works cynically exploited this situation or critically commented on it, but in neither case could his sculptures be faulted for naïveté about their role in the system or, more generally, art’s newfound one.56

If any proof were needed that markets and marketing were already a self-conscious part of Koons’s early work, one only has to point to the fact that advertising plays a decisive role in five of his first eight series, whether in the reprinted advertisements of The New and Luxury and Degradation, the appropriated Nike posters of Equilibrium, the magazine ads of Banality, or the billboard announcing Made in Heaven. In each case, Koons toyed with the idea of turning an ad into an artwork and an artwork into an ad. The deadpan, appropriative

The other fearful symmetry that Koons’s work lays bare is that of art and money. It’s nearly impossible to have a conversation or read an article about the artist that doesn’t somehow touch on the topic. What may be surprising is that this was pretty much the case from day one. In Koons’s very first review, published in Artforum in 1981, critic Richard Flood deemed the work “a commentary on the glamour of conspicuous consumption,” and it would not be long until the press grew equally fixated on the way Koons’s art was itself so avidly consumed.50 The mid-1980s witnessed an unprecedented surge in the market for contemporary art, and Koons became its poster boy, as writers seemed almost dumbfounded that any artist’s work could attract so much notice and such high prices in so little time. Countless articles described in detail the uptick in his prices, which for Equilibrium began at less than $3,000, then doubled in a matter of months over 1985, so that by 1988 his galleries could plausibly ask $250,000 for each of the three editions of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a rise that exceeded even that of the decade’s bullish financial markets. These statistics were often accompanied by the names of the dealers, advisers, and buyers responsible for the fever pitch, right down to the very month that mega-collector Charles Saatchi entered Koons’s market (December 1985).51 In retrospect, the coverage betrays an air of disbelief and a desire to master it that feels almost poignant. A brave new era was dawning, and it compelled a public vivisection that would be unheard of even today for a thirty-year-old artist. By the time Schjeldahl declared Koons “the artist of the present Age of Money” in 1989, such a statement seemed less opinion than fact.52 And although that critic was referring to the apogee of the Reagan-Thatcher era, the Age and the artist are still so much with us that Koons’s example again proves worth pondering.

All of this would be far less interesting if financial values and systems weren’t themselves a self-conscious aspect of Koons’s art. Any monochrome painting can be subject to an accelerating price index without visibly registering that fact. From the start, however, Koons’s art demonstrated a sly and reflexive relationship to the commodities it cannibalized and aped. The early Inflatables, as we have seen, inaugurated his persistent preoccupation with the logic of display, a vital link between the presentation of artworks and commodities. Subsequent bodies of work pushed this interest further. The fluorescent light fixtures of Pre-New lend banal store-bought products an otherworldly nimbus, while the lambent acrylic cases of The New further conflate the types of

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nature of the examples from the first three of these series made it hard for critics to argue that Koons was deconstructing capitalism’s visual codes, as was claimed for the repurposed and abstracted advertisements of Dara Birnbaum and Richard Prince, among others. Yet something about the way Koons’s chosen images function in the space of the gallery gives them a blunt, almost nefarious edge. Ripped wholesale from the commercial welter of the world, they are beautiful yet bleak, seductive yet brutal, more nakedly exposed than similar imagery made abstract or arty in putatively more critical hands. The relationship of his art to corporate structures was made taut and complex by the direct way he engaged them. To procure mint copies of his chosen posters, Koons flew to the Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters of Nike; to make his liquor-ad paintings, he used the printing plates from the original advertisements. In a dizzying conceptual feint, he had his stainless-steel casts of Jim Beam collectibles filled with bourbon at the company’s Kentucky distillery and sealed with actual paper tax stamps, imbricating them directly within the corporate, governmental, and market systems they simultaneously celebrated and skewered.

Koons’s biography reveals that he was always interested in the fine art of selling and the selling of fine art.

His interviews are peppered with mentions of the joy he found as a child hawking wrapping paper door to door, an activity that made him feel he was “meeting people’s needs,” and of his pride in selling his first canvases at the tender age of eight in his father’s store.57 In his frontline post at the Museum of Modern Art, he famously sold memberships at an unprecedented clip thanks to an affable demeanor and outrageous dress (think sequined vests and novelty ties) indebted to the flamboyant salesmanship of his hero Dalí. His flair for sales attracted more lucrative offers, and when he left MoMA in 1980 it was for jobs on Wall Street selling mutual funds and, later, trading commodities. This fact was often cited in articles in the mid-1980s that focused on Koons’s thenescalating prices, as though his employment history might offer proof that he had been a cunning market manipulator all along.58

Yet nothing could have been further from the truth.

Koons repeatedly contended that his nearly five-year stint on Wall Street was always aimed at raising the capital necessary to produce his increasingly expensive art, which initially found few backers or sold at such losses (sometimes less than a quarter of the production cost) that he had to retreat to his parents’ house in Sarasota, Florida, in 1982 to get back on his feet.59 Little more than a decade later, he faced financial ruin again when his Celebration works proved far costlier to fabricate to his exacting standards than he had sold the unmade

Koons in 1977 during his time as an employee at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in front of James Rosenquist’s Marilyn, 1962

sculptures for, and even the support of a trio of wellheeled dealers and better-heeled collectors couldn’t save him from having to lay off nearly his entire staff when in 1997 money ran out and his production screeched to a halt.60 I cite these boom-and-bust tales not out of salacious interest or to vouch for Koons’s honor but to make a point often lost in the frothy coverage of Koons’s market: His business model has always been risky at best and disastrous at worst. If he happens ultimately to have done well for himself, it’s not because that was ever truly his goal or because his production methods portended it. As Koons himself has put it, “It would be much more economically viable for me to produce something efficient, low-budget, and to get it out.” 61 In this sense, he is a bad “business artist,” to borrow Warhol’s infamous term, in part because he is uninterested in — or constitutionally incapable of — producing so much product. His dealer Ileana Sonnabend put it succinctly in 1991: “Jeff doesn’t understand money at all.” 62 By contrast, Prince, Hirst, and Takashi Murakami, market stars with whom Koons is often lumped, are far more pragmatic models and far better heirs of Warhol’s legacy in this regard. The

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Pink Panther sold at auction for a record $1.8 million.) 63 It’s easy as an artist or critic to be contemptuous of such finagling, especially if one’s working method appears to allow one independence from some of the art world’s least wholesome structures. After all, any half-decent talent with a bolt of canvas and a tube of paint is better poised to realize far greater profit margins. Yet if those same artists look out of place — nervous, guilty, conflicted — at an art fair, at a museum gala, or smiling from within a magazine spread, Koons seems at ease not just by dint of his cheery disposition but because such appearances are indispensable to the creation of his art, and therefore central to his practice. A strangely pragmatic absolution attends the untold and unconflicted handshakes and smiles on trips from Los Angeles to Qatar to sell clients with a taste for the unique what are often essentially high-priced multiples distinguished by color.

Koons doesn’t dream of making money; he dreams of making artworks. The money is a means to an end, and his ability to marshal so much of it has allowed him to produce some of the most extraordinarily crafted works of art since patronage was wrested from the hands of princes and popes. True, this might be possible only in an era of increasing inequality, but it remains an open question as to whether the future will judge such objects more harshly for their economic underpinnings than today one assesses, say, the dome of Saint Peter’s, which, like Koons’s work, was paid for by the one percent but broadly enjoyed by the remaining ninety-nine. Money is so conspicuously central to Koons’s process and such an exaggerated aspect of his hyperproduced objects that it inevitably becomes one of their subjects—even when, after 1990, this became less a function of their specific motifs (a crucial point of distinction from the misleading, if frequently invoked, comparisons to, say, Prince’s check paintings, Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, or Murakami’s endlessly branded wares).64 This outward mien causes discomfort in those who might prefer that the financial value of an artwork be divorced from, or at least concealed behind, its aesthetic ones, as in the case of similarly expensive paintings by a Brice Marden or a Johns. It has led many critics, in fact, to sniff that Koons’s work plays to the unsophisticated tastes of the nouveau riche or is somehow “specifically attuned” to the hankerings of a “new oligarchy,” just as Frank Jewett Mather once claimed that William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s vapid nudes were aimed at crass American stockbrokers (a point the artist himself conceded, and that Koons later echoed when declaring his art a support system for his bourgeois patrons).65 Mather’s reasoning may have had some merit when stockbrokers preferred academic schlock to paintings by Edgar Degas, but it doesn’t really

Louise Lawler, Egg and Gun, at Large, 2008. Chromogenic print mounted to acrylic on museum box, 28 9⁄16 x 22 15⁄16 in.

(72.5 x 58.3 cm). Edition of 5

reason Koons minted five Balloon Dog sculptures was not to increase his take but to make the meticulously engineered object financially viable, since the breakeven point on fewer examples would have been impossibly high. There couldn’t have been one without the whole litter.

All along, Koons’s expert salesmanship has served as the grease that keeps the wheels of his system turning.

I remember a studio visit when one of his dealers told me he felt guilty for having distracted the artist from his work by bringing a favored client for a dazzling tour, but later I realized that what we had witnessed was Koons’s work: not performance art exactly, but the perfect pitch for selling multimillion-dollar sculptures on the basis of foamcore maquettes to patrons, who must often wait longer to claim the finished piece than they would the fruits of a speculative real-estate venture. If Koons seems unnaturally interested in his auction prices, more accommodating of requests from Christie’s or Sotheby’s to shill for a sale of which he will receive no cut, this is in part because his very ability to produce new work depends on his prices remaining lofty enough to induce people to pay so dearly for it. (The Celebration sculptures, for example, only began flowing again by virtue of a broader rise in Koons’s market, which began around 1999, when

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unifying sign of money. It seizes and distorts them within its seductive reflective curves. Like so many of Koons’s sculptures, Balloon Dog is, paradoxically, at once solicitous and tough. The latter quality should not be underestimated at a time when so much art seems to buckle with embarrassment under a pecuniary attention it neither seeks nor sustains. Koons’s example is not that of an artist playing to or just riffing on a market, but of one who in supple ways uses that market to create something that could never have been made before and could now be made only by him. We might wish Koons to overturn the table rather than take his place at it, but in choosing the latter he serves as a beacon of an artist’s empowerment when many feel like pawns in a game they’d prefer not to play. His is a singular case for a singular time, and the cause of art is somehow richer for it.

NE PLUS ULTRA

For an artist who has persistently claimed to have little interest in craft per se, Koons has arguably pursued it more ruthlessly than any of our age. 67 One could argue further that he is unmatched in the range of techniques and mediums (if not precisely materials) encompassed by his art. Even a partial accounting is dizzying: a multitude of approaches to casting steel, bronze, aluminum, glass, porcelain, plastic, and plaster; carved wood and marble; rotationally molded polyethylene; carpentry; milled granite, bronze, marble, and steel; photomechanical printing; gilding, glazing, and mirror-polishing; and a constantly evolving variety of approaches to oil painting by hand. This leaves aside strategies such as exhibiting appropriated objects, fabricating acrylic vitrines and tanks with anti-vibration feet, or, for that matter, practicing horticulture at small scale (the potted petunias of Pluto and Proserpina [pl. 128]) and large (the towering topiaries). And it ignores all the behind-thescenes processes that precede the aforementioned, such as light and CT scanning; 3-D printing; plaster modeling; photography; and good-old-fashioned drawing and collage, as well as their digital variants. The tally of people employed in this work over the past thirty-five years would number into the thousands, including Koons’s assistants (now counting more than 120), various industrial manufacturers, high-tech consultants, the makers of Spalding basketballs (who supply custom replacement parts for deteriorated models), and the Nobel-laureate physicist whom Koons consulted to levitate those balls in their tanks, as well as the wood carvers of Bavaria and glassblowers of Pennsylvania, among other ateliers plying centuries-old techniques.

Installation view, Jeff Koons Versailles, Château de Versailles, France, 2008–9. Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994 – 2000

hold up when our own newly rich have no greater appetite for a Koons than they do for a Johns or a Marden, a Cindy Sherman or a Wade Guyton. The difference is that Koons’s objects own up to their value and in part can exist only because of it. They act as uncanny barometers of the unseen pressures that surround them wherever they happen to be. It is certainly no coincidence that Louise Lawler — that great poet of art’s lived circumstance — has made Koons’s sculptures a favored subject (no. 16, p. 98; no. 15, p. 117).

Take, for example, Balloon Dog. It’s not for nothing that Koons has called the sculpture a Trojan Horse.66 Its cold, shiny surfaces seem to condense the hothouse flows of capital and desire that both bring it into being and buoy its movement around the globe. We can almost imagine it sweating like a crystal tumbler on a billionaire’s yacht (and Koons has designed one of those, too).

Balloon Dog works its hardest and looks its best in places like the crisp lobby of the Seagram Building or the ornate Salon d’Hercule at the Château de Versailles, or standing proudly outside Christie’s Rockefeller Center edifice, venues where most modern sculptures would appear as compromised as priests at a brothel. Balloon Dog understands and even shares the logics of these sites, all conceived under disparate formal programs and the

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The list is long but not gratuitous. Unlike most artists who develop a body of work from a well-honed relationship to a particular technique, Koons usually starts from scratch. In rare instances he may be inspired by the potential of a specific medium or technology, but more often than not his approach arises as a way to realize an image in his head. And that image is never limited to what he — or anyone else — knows how to make. In this sense, he is correct in arguing that his methods are merely means to various ends, though that phrasing fails to account for just how difficult those means are to master and sometimes to invent, as well as how crucial they are to the conceptual underpinnings of his project. I use “means” here quite broadly. By procuring the original printing plates for his liquor ads, for example, or filling and sealing his steel vehicles at the Jim Beam distillery, he directly harnessed within his work the same systems he intended to critique. These extreme measures were as much a part of his process as was casting, and in both cases a much easier solution could have been found to achieve visually similar ends. When Koons set his sights on gift-shop bibelots, he traveled to remote European villages to contract their far-flung makers, just as he hired Cicciolina’s or David Bowie’s photographers when he meant to fashion himself, respectively, as a lover or a star.

Nothing else would do.

Even when Koons is outsourcing his production, he maintains as tight a grip on the process as if he were making something with his own hands. Exhaustive faxes sent from hotels in Cologne and Milan to the artisans of Banality ring with the urgency of an epistolary novel set on a military front. Regarding a detail no more than an inch long on the five-foot-wide String of Puppies (pl. 64), the artist scrawled: “I MUST BE SURE FLOWER ON TOP OF MAN’S HEAD HAS BEEN GIVEN THE STEM I REQUESTED.” “THE COLOR OF STRING OF PUPPIES IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.” To his dealers back on the home front in New York, he inveighed: “I MUST PROTECT MY WORK!” 68 Yet these fabrication challenges were modest compared to those of the past two decades, which required the pioneering of new technologies. This difficulty came to the fore with the Celebration series (pls. 81–92), which was conceived in 1994 and remains unfinished. For Koons, the subjects of the series were meant to evoke the cycle of a year or even a life. They invoke birth, love, religious observances, and procreation, whether in the form of a cracked egg, an engagement ring, the paraphernalia of a birthday party, or the sexually suggestive curves and protuberances lurking within a balloon animal or flower. 69 He envisioned a body of work involving large-scale metal and plastic sculptures and multiple oils on canvas, some of which

Play-Doh, 1995 – 2008. Oil on canvas, 131 1⁄4 x 111 1⁄4 in.

(333.4 x 282.6 cm). Collection of the artist

were impossible to achieve exactly as he imagined them.

Koons had to push specialized fabricators to mold his maquettes and cast, assemble, polish, and paint sculptures as they never had before. Even after years of work in sites across the country and around the globe, some of the objects had to be scrapped and completely reconceived or begun again.

I remember witnessing this firsthand over a number of visits in 2004 to Koons’s studio, where he and his assistants were toiling away on the painting Play-Doh. Like all of Koons’s canvases, the work depended on the fastidious replication of a source image, in this case a photograph of a mound of the titular substance that had been broken into thousands of crisp contours, then painstakingly transferred to canvas and colored in one by one. No painting had ever been made before in quite this way. When I first saw Play-Doh it was ostensibly finished, having been published and exhibited on multiple occasions. Yet when I encountered it again during a later visit to Koons’s studio, a pair of assistants were daubing it with paint. The colors weren’t quite right, Koons explained, and on a subsequent visit I was astonished — or rather horrified — to find that after countless man-hours the canvas had been cut into pieces and commenced afresh, this time using slightly updated techniques that might more precisely achieve Koons’s desired palette. Once

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the second version was finished, I would have been hardpressed to distinguish it from the first without studying both side by side, and the same could certainly have been said for any likely buyer.70

Settling, for Koons, is never an option. Corners cannot be cut. Though his standards continue to escalate, this dedication to perfection has been present from the very beginning of his career. Koons’s fanatical devotion to his readymade models and the “integrity” of his objects led him to cast pieces like Fisherman Golfer, Jim Beam— Model A Ford Pick-up Truck, and Two Kids with moving parts (pls. 34, 43, 50), even if they were never really intended to be interactive and their changeability is not evident to the naked eye. He has often spoken of spending time and money finishing the undersides of his sculptures, just in case their nether regions were ever exposed and might risk letting the viewer down.71 For Koons, this is a matter of earning his audience’s “trust,” which he prizes over all else: trust in the work, trust in its maker, and trust in the very idea and power of art. After all, over the preceding century, this trust had eroded for many observers of modern art thanks to its purposeful abnegation of craft. Skill was supplanted by “deskilling” as a means to challenge traditional aesthetic values and reorient our attention from manual finesse to conceptual novelty.

According to this line of reasoning, a commitment to craft in general, or to a quality like verisimilitude in particular,

by Koons or anyone else, might be impugned as retardataire. But, in fact, his sedulous craftsmanship and increasing technological innovation have broken new ground for art and enmeshed it more forcefully within the visual logic of the contemporary world — whether through collage paintings that depend on computer software for their compositional and mimetic prowess (pl. 113) or objects rendered with a precision that could be accomplished only by the most advanced machinery of our time. Koons is not the first artist to appropriate methods from science and industry, but his reach has gone further than any of his predecessors, and, as Michelle Kuo argues in this volume, it extends even beyond the known boundaries of the fields he mines for expertise.72 Yet for all Koons’s obsession with production, his work somehow manages to avoid feeling “overproduced.” Despite their expense, his objects demonstrate a stringent economy. Everything and nothing about them is excessive. They exude a sense of deliberateness and even concision in keeping with Koons’s emphasis on ends over means. One could appreciate one of his paintings or sculptures more or less, but rarely could one point to a particular passage or technique within a given work and claim it unnecessary or out of sync with any other. Even if his works encourage slow delectation, one ultimately consumes them whole.

Why bother, one might ask, to spend two decades and millions of dollars assiduously engineering a tenfoot-tall aluminum mound of Play-Doh (pl. 89)? Why bother, one could answer, to spend five years on one’s back decorating the Sistine ceiling? Or a lifetime painting dates like On Kawara or the Vivian Girls like Henry Darger? The reasons are not the same, of course, but in each case we are compelled by the artist’s profound commitment to his work. This quality is one of the primary feelings aroused by Koons’s art at its best. It evinces an insanity bound by reason. The asymmetry between his quotidian subjects and meticulous methodology is in large measure what makes his works so stupefying to contemplate, if riveting to behold. We are gripped by the exactness of their minute details but also by the absurdity of anyone laboring so long and hard to realize an image as ostensibly dumb as a kitten in a sock or an inflatable Hulk supporting a boulder. Their shrewd precision invokes in us the consuming wonder of a child before a toy, and also, at times, a sense of awe and even terror.

Koons’s sculptures and paintings embody the maniacal dream of the perfect object — one whose perfection must be palpable according to its own internal logic, whether through its immaculate surface, accurate coloration, or impossible scale. This perfection is central to the sense of love, trust, and support he says he hopes his works will convey, an aim that sometimes evokes a peculiar pathos, as in the case of the Celebration series, which became an ode to Koons’s abducted son. Its objects are endowed, to borrow a phrase from Mike Kelley, with “more love hours than can ever be repaid,” 73 as well as with a determination, intensity, and invention that amplify and transcend their iconography. Koons would rather destroy a sculpture or cut up a canvas than have it leave his clutches in a state that does not meet his standards — and these standards, though sometimes difficult precisely to perceive, are always deeply felt.

THEN AND NOW

I often ask artists two or three decades younger than Koons what they think about him and his work. The answers vary, of course, but my admittedly unscientific poll has found considerable consensus on two points.

The first is that Koons is a “real artist.” In calling him “real,” my respondents are referring to his absolute and unstinting dedication to his work. One artist memorably expressed her admiration as follows: “He’s figured out this way to deal with so much bullshit in the world to make exactly what he wants. That’s just really hard to do.” In her eyes, his example is not one of capitulation

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the maw of pop culture and consumer products, Koons casts his long shadow.

These parameters are by no means all-encompassing, but it is Koons’s bright delineation of them that has made him a defining artist of our era. He was already recognized as such at a startlingly early point in his career. In 1987 curator Allan Schwartzman declared the thirty-two-year-old Koons “the greatest reflection of our age.” 74 The following year Schjeldahl wrote that “he may be the definitive artist of this moment,” and in 1989 Sherrie Levine dubbed him “the ultimate child of our time.” That same year Eric Gibson handed Koons the decade, claiming that in his work “the essential character of the ’80s is to be found.” 75 Such laurels were not without their thorns. Calling Koons the reflection of an age is not the same thing as claiming that he holds a mirror to it. And granting Koons a decade associated with Reaganomics, yuppies, and the AIDS crisis is a bit like congratulating Jean-Honoré Fragonard for nailing the ’80s in eighteenth-century France. We might take greater comfort in an avatar along the lines of Willem de Kooning, whose canvases typify the 1950s while appearing outwardly innocent of the pox of, say, McCarthyism or segregation. But we nevertheless tend to credit artists for crystallizing an era’s noxiousness, especially if they do so with the singular pellucidity that Koons has. In this he is more like the German Neue Sachlichkeit painters of the 1920s, who maintained a potentially reactionary hold on figuration while reflecting the complex mores of their society, with all the ethical ambiguity that implied.

The 1980s passed and Koons remained. Despite the ostracism that befell the artist after Made in Heaven, in 1992 Renato Barilli declared Koons “the most representative artist of the last years of this century, of this dying millennium,” and well into the next one Saltz dubbed him “the emblematic artist of the decade — its thumping, thumping heart.” 76 That these words were written in 2009, some two decades after the first one Koons was said to epitomize, makes them all the more remarkable. One could argue, of course, that the artist’s staying power is due less to his constancy than to that of the epoch with which it has coincided—a point that could be made by citing, say, the continuous growth of income inequality from the 1980s to today. But we could just as easily adduce more recent milestones and ruptures that mark our distance from Koons’s emergence, whether the events of 9/11, the election of the first African American president, the collapse of the global economy, advances in gay marriage equality, and the explosion of the internet. In the context of art alone, tastes have changed; new forms, mediums, and critical paradigms

Puppy, 1992, installed at Rockefeller Center, New York, 2000

or collusion with the system but of holding one’s own in the midst of it. The second point of agreement is that Koons — love him or hate him — cannot be easily dismissed. His precedent simply looms too large and at so many turns. Indeed, anytime an artist today contracts a fabricator for a custom part, as is a common practice, she is trailing in the wake of Koons, who raised that bar far higher than Judd could have imagined. Anytime an artist’s ascent makes him lucky (or unlucky) enough to be photographed for a glossy magazine, Koons’s precedent hovers like a deity (or devil). Anytime an artist’s work sells at auction — or, conversely, an artist decides to explore a distribution system completely outside the marketplace — Koons’s astronomical prices serve as an outer point of reference. Anytime an artist turns to the readymade, Koons’s deadpan appropriations and doppelgängers demark possible extremes. Anytime an artist commits her all to a project that might take months or years to complete, Koons’s decades-long pursuit of his works comes to mind. And anytime an artist stares into

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have emerged; markets have twice soared and plummeted; global awareness has grown; and biennials and art fairs have proliferated. My point is not that Koons’s work registers all these shifts, but rather that he was seen by many observers as “the artist of the moment” before they occurred, and for many he remains so even after.

It is exceedingly rare that an artist comes to exemplify a decade in his or her own time. It is rarer still — if not unprecedented in the modern era —that he or she could be said to exemplify the arc of three.

The reason for this, I’d argue, is that Koons is not just a child of our time but an active agent of it, one who has forged an extreme aesthetic position in concert with an admittedly problematic but also promising epoch.

The boundaries he has broken are unique to his historical position within art’s great narrative and draw on the larger forces — technological, financial, social, and otherwise — of the moment in which we live. His art does not merely reflect or absorb its context, be it a gallery, home, magazine, billboard, or museum. It gives as much as it takes, drawing in its surroundings and illuminating them with a peculiar truth-telling aura. I’ve already described this process with respect to a number of Koons’s works and even to the artist himself, but his masterpiece in this regard is Puppy. On its own, the topiary terrier can be seen as a lovable if monstrously hypertrophied embodiment of our abiding affection for dogs and flowers. But for all its obdurate heft it remains surprisingly supple. The first time I saw it was outside Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it pointed to our then-dawning yen for new cultural monuments, from destination architecture to site-specific installations. A few years later it surfaced at that beacon of capitalism, Rockefeller Center, looking smaller and less picturesque but more hotwired to its site than any public sculpture I’ve seen. Suddenly, I took notice of the tacky flowers lining the mall and sprouting from planters above the ice rink, while tourists and businessmen alike delighted before a golden calf for a new gilded age. And a few years after that I encountered it on a sylvan Connecticut estate, where it served as both a trophy and a symbol of fealty, braiding together ideals of the cultivated and the natural within its shaggy coat.

Wherever Koons’s works are, they wondrously refocus their surroundings. They channel and provoke our vanities and desires, our sense of discovery and mortality, and sometimes our moral pique and joy. They take as much as they can from the world in which we live and offer in return a powerful picture of it. We could ask for more from art, but I doubt that we will find it.

NOTES 1.

2.

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Smith quoted in Alan Jones, “Jeff Koons,” Arts, November 1983, 11; ibid.

Allan Schwartzman, “Corporate Culture: The Yippie-Yuppie Artist,” Manhattan, Inc., December 1987, 137; Richard Lacayo, “Artist Jeff Koons Makes, and Earns, Giant Figures,” People Weekly, May 8, 1989, 128; Adam Gopnik, “The Art World: Lost and Found,” New Yorker, February 20, 1989, 107.

Robert Rosenblum, “Jeff Koons: Christ and the Lamb,” Artforum, September 1993, 148.

Paul Taylor, “The Hot Four,” New York, October 27, 1986, 53; Linda Van Nunen, “Loony Koons,” Studio, February 1, 1991, 89; Kathryn Tully, “The Most Expensive Art Ever Sold at Auction: Christie’s Record-Breaking Sale,” Forbes, November 13, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryntully/2013/11/13/themost-expensive-art-ever-sold-at-auction-christies-recordbreaking-sale/.

Jerry Saltz, “Jeffersonian Koons,” Village Voice, June 20, 2000; Peter Schjeldahl, “The Blooming Beast,” New Yorker, July 3, 2000, 76; Freedman quoted in Shaila K. Dewan, “No Walking, Just Watering for This Puppy,” New York Times, June 6, 2000.

Joe La Placa, “The Candyman Can,” ArtReview, April 2003, 49; Julie L. Belcove, “Koons World,” W, November 2006, 312; Ingrid Sischy, “Koons, High and Low,” Vanity Fair, March 2001, 226.

Richard Dorment, “Smile! It’s Jeff Koons,” Telegraph (London), July 7, 2009; Luke Crisell, “Inside the Artists Studio,” Nylon Guys, Summer 2006, 116.

Blake Gopnik, “Man From Mars Comes in Peace,” Washington Post, June 17, 2008.

Schwartzman ascribes this sentiment to Koons’s “critics,” in Schwartzman, “The Yippie-Yuppie Artist,” 137.

Most monographic publications on Koons hew to a chronological structure according to his various series, which are often preceded by texts and quotations by Koons elaborating the given body of work. The most comprehensive overview of his work is found in Katy Siegel’s illuminating texts in Jeff Koons, ed. Hans Werner Holzwarth (Cologne: Taschen, 2009).

Matthew Collings, “You are a White Man, Jeff . . . ,” Modern Painters, Summer 1989, 62.

Ruth Lopez, “Conversation: Jeff Koons,” Chicago Magazine, May 30, 2008, http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/ June-2008/Conversation-Jeff-Koons/.

Koons cites these influences and discusses his early years in Chicago and New York in Alan Jones, “Jeff Koons” (interview), Tema Celeste, November – December 2001, 36 – 39. This period is also well recounted in Daniel Pinchbeck, “Kitsch and Tell,” Connoisseur, November 1991, 30–36, 124 – 25.

Jones, “Jeff Koons” (interview), 36.

Steinbach’s 1979 exhibition Display #7 at Artists Space in New York, for example, included store-bought objects, such as a teapot, presented on wall-mounted shelving. See Haim Steinbach, exh. cat. (Rivoli: Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 1995).

Jeff Koons, “By Jeff Koons,” Art Criticism 7, no. 1, February 1989, 29.

Although many of the works in The New bear hyphenated dates that extend as far as 1987, the first date indicates the year in which the work was conceived. Koons was unable to execute all of them at that initial moment, given the expense of fabrication, and completed some later as funding allowed.

Koons has discussed these childhood experiences in many interviews over the past twenty years, but he relates his interest in the readymade to his father’s decorating store in great depth in his 2013 conversation with Pharrell Williams: “Jeff Koons & Pharrell: Affirmation Abstration Acceptance,” ARTST TLK, Reserve Channel, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjqajvmkxM.