“The American artist doesn’t feel as though they need permission,” Koons says on the BBC Late Show. “They’re like a little kid who will just grab and do anything it wants, because it’s really about seeking spiritual salvation—it doesn’t feel like it has to perform in a good manner.” He smiles like a televangelist, with white teeth and open love. His words are tender with innocent excitement, gushing with cliche phraseology and a syrupy cadence. “That’s the strength, that’s the heroicness of American art in the 20th century,” he says. One of the panelists retort, “Isn’t that just about monstrous confidence?”
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On 12 November 2013, Jeff Koons breaks the record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction by a living artist—his Balloon Dog (Orange), goes to an anonymous bidder for a cool $58.4 million.
Yes, this thing.
As one of the wealthiest living artists today, it would be hard for Koons to avoid the spotlight—that is, if he even wanted to. He enjoys the public eye, collaborating with popular figures and brands such as Lady Gaga and Louis Vuitton. His best known works include his shiny sculptures (including Balloon Dog) from Celebration, reproductions of pop culture icons (like Popeye, Hulk, and Pink Panther), as well as the controversial series Made in Heaven which features explicitly pornographic images of him and his ex-wife. Art historians and the public alike remain divided on Koons. While supporters see his art as powerful, affirmative statements on modern American life, critics accuse him of being a cynical, self-merchandising con artist, with his work being shallow and kitschy.
As an artist, Koons seems to have little of the proverbial angst and personal struggle that people in his profession seem predisposed to have. He seems to have none of van Gogh’s madness, Pollock’s alcoholism, Rothko’s depression. He says didactic things like, “art to me is a humanitarian act, and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect mankind, to make the world a better place,” as he did to Klaus Ottman back in 1986. Perhaps opponents might want to diagnose him with delusions of self-grandeur. But either way, Jeff Koons is an important, quintessentially American artist with an American life story.
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Jeff Koons was born into the small town of York, Pennsylvania in 1955. His father, Henry, was a furniture dealer and interior decorator. Koons first learned about aesthetics through his father’s store, admitting that he really “did not know fine art as a child.” He was, however, enamoured enough by Salvador Dali that, as a teenager, he went to the St. Regis Hotel in New York City just to meet him. After attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Koons moved to New York City, working at the membership desk of MoMA.
To finance his own art, Koons began working as a Wall Street commodities broker 1980, which he did for six years before becoming a full time artist. “I could make exactly what art I wanted to make,” he told Angelika Muthesius. The art he made reflected that very decade: Reaganomics, the end of the Cold War, American rebirth, rampant corporate growth, and materialistic optimism. His first major show, The New, opened in 1980. Along with commercial billboards and advertisements, the exhibit most prominently featured a whole bunch of Hoover vacuum cleaners installed with fluorescent lights. He was consciously moving away from the movements of Abstract Expressionism and other subjective types of art. “I wanted to move into the objective. I did not want to paint what I dreamt the night before; I wanted to be involved in a more universal vocabulary.”
He found that language in the legacy of ready-made art, reminiscent of Duchamp or Warhol. However, Koons removes the blatant irony, the overt social critique. The Hoovers are meant to be intoxicating and exciting. More than just asking questions as Duchamp or Warhol did about the definition and value of art, Koons hints at answers. By presenting the newness of the age with “integrity,” Koons shows the extravagance and thrill of materialism without critiquing it, leaving us to judge it as we please. He remarked with pleasure that people were coming into the exhibit off the streets to buy vacuum cleaners, to the annoyance of the security guards—such was the commercial allure of the show.
Very seductive, indeed.
Equilibrium appeared in 1985. It featured bronze inflatables, basketball posters, basketballs inside tanks of chemically altered water that allowed the balls to float within the solution. Koons reached out to Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman in order to create these tanks, which Koons likened to “an embryo within the womb.” Jeffrey Deitch, calling Koons an “astute student of sociology,” said that the theme of basketball reflects the sport’s symbolism of aspiration and potential for social mobility.
In 1988, Koons revealed Banality, an entire show dedicated to sculptures of trinkets and toys, blown up in size as if to monumentalize them. Among them is Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a tacky, golden porcelain sculpture of the two titular figures. Others include Popples, a plump, cutesy porcelain sculpture of a stuffed animal, and Bear and Policeman, a life-sized sculpture of a cartoonish bear with its arm around a policeman’s shoulder. The Whitney Museum, which held a major retrospective of Koons in 2014, described Banality as “aimed at freeing us to embrace without embarrassment our childhood affection for toys or the trinkets lining our grandparents’ shelves.” Koons added, in an interview with Elena Cue, “I was trying to communicate to people is that they are perfect. That everything about their cultural history, everything about their own personal history is perfect.”
Embarrassed about liking this? Jeff Koons says, “Don’t be.”
1989 came Koons’ arguably most controversial work: Made in Heaven. Initially conceived as a feature film starring himself and pornstar Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina), Koons ended up marrying her and producing a whole series of explicit pieces with her. Twinned with kitschy sculptures of kittens and flowers, Made in Heaven is polarizing to this day, challenging the line between pornography and art the basic line of decency in the gallery setting. While some have praised the series as creating a sort of “modern day Adam and Eve,” art critics such as William Feaver as disparaged it as “lacking all the breath of fresh art.” While Koons insists that the project was to make us more accepting of our deepest, shameful desires, Made in Heaven has left a legacy of mixed reception and marked a peak of shock art.
But controversial as it was in itself, Made in Heaven took a darker, personal turn when Staller left Koons abruptly, taking their toddler son Ludwig with her. In the midst of a custody battle that cost millions of dollars and the divorce proceedings, Koons destroyed most of Made in Heaven. And with the exception of Puppy, a 40 foot sculpture of a dog covered with flowers, Koons disappeared from the art world for most of the 90’s.
Celebration marked his comeback—albeit a belated one, since delays and budgetary problems forced a 1996 show at the Guggenheim exhibit in New York to be cancelled. With the aid of a few faithful investors, Koons was able to produce some of his now most enduring works: Hanging Heart, Play-Doh, Diamond, and of course, Balloon Dog. The series marked Koons’ return from personal hardship as well as a continuing dedication to objective, optimistic art. Koons said that his fascination with mirror-finish stainless steel—the material for many of the Celebration pieces—stems from the belief that art takes place in the viewer: the reflection of the viewer onto the work itself serves as a reminder of that belief. Celebration has also contained Koons’ most materially successful works. Balloon Dog, of course, remains the most expensive sculpture ever sold by a living artist. Tulips, another colorful, mirror-finish sculpture, sold for $33.6 million in 2012. Diamond (Blue) sold for $11.8 million, while Balloon Flower (Magenta) went for $25.7 million.
The Tulip Mania of 1637 has nothing on this $33.6 million flower.
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“No other artist so lends himself to a caricature of the indecently rich ravening after the vulgarly bright and shiny,” writer Peter Schjeldahl says. “But mockery comes harder when, approaching the work with eyes and mind open, you encounter Koons’s formidable aesthetic intelligence.”
Koons is a perfectionist. “Each painting takes about two years. Sculptures take, on average, three years.” He has a workshop in Chelsea, Manhattan, where he employs around 125 assistants to execute his work. “I’m basically the idea person,” he tells Klaus Ottman. “I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people. [But] I’m always trying to maintain the integrity of the work.” The products are always impeccable objects that glisten and defy regular workmanship. His paintings, massive and photorealistic, are the painstaking labors of assistants working from a digital plan made by Koons, and following a color-by-numbers system. The place bears some resemblance to Andy Warhol’s Factory, but instead of cheap mass-produced works, Koons insists on the highest quality, often destroying pieces that don’t live up to his vision.
“For a lot of Jeff’s work, he has to wait for industry to catch up,” says Scott Rothkopf, chief curator at the Whitney Museum. Play-Doh, for example, took twenty years to complete. Gorilla, an 8 foot high granite sculpture, required significant technology to create. They had to render a wax figure, digitally collect the data, and then use a sophisticated milling machine to carve the actual stone. Koons’ extensive use of stainless steel, reflects what he feels to be a “proletariat” spirit, something both common but enduring that is meant to—like Greek and Roman statues of antiquity—last literally thousands of years. That too, takes exceptional use of technology, as well as a lot of polishing.
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Many accuse Koons of pandering and playing the art market, making his millions off of billionaire collectors. But “Rubens had his kings [supporting him], Bernini had his cardinals,” Curator Norman Rosenthal says. “Jeff Koons—he’s supported by the kings and cardinals of his time. And thank God for that.” Koons does obliquely address the gross economics of his art. He says, “I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery. I like the tension of accessibility and inaccessibility, and the morality in the art gallery.” It’s unclear if Koons means to admit to to a level of immorality in his art, or if he wants us to take into account the egregious amount of money spent on his works when confronting them.
Critic Christopher Knight says Koons’ work brings out a “distinctly American set of conventional middle-class values.” Of course, the slight irony is that on the surface, Jeff Koons appears most appreciated by everyone other than the middle class. The rich and super-rich seem to value his work very much, with orders coming in and collectors scrambling to get a hold of one piece or another. On the other hand, Koons’ work, kitschy as it is, has an immediacy to it that especially spellbinds children and the innocent. Peter Schjeldahl provides this anecdote:
I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s “Puppy.” As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.
And in response to criticisms about his art being pure, unabashed kitsch, Koons simply says, “Kitsch is a word that I really don’t believe in.” Kitsch: art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, according to Oxford Dictionary. It seems apt enough to describe many of Koons’ work, but for Koons, his art as far away from poor taste and garishness as possible: it’s supposed to be philosophical, even metaphysical. He advocates for “removing judgment and practicing acceptance.” And certainly it would be easier to see the balloon dogs and porcelain figures as philosophical if one could simply accept it as is, and not scoff at the plain reality that these objects are in many ways just glorified everyday objects. A friend told me, “it really all depends. You either see it as bullshit, or you see it as something philosophical. It just depends on you.” And Koons, who strongly believes in the power of the viewer to decide, would probably be okay with that.
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Jeff Koons lives in a Manhattan townhouse with his wife, Justine Wheeler, and their six children. Wheeler was a former assistant in Koons’ studio, who had written her thesis on her future husband’s art and then met him at a bar in SoHo. Koons often mentions his kids as inspirations for his work. Once his toddler son made a small mound of play-doh, and when Koons approached him, he put it in from of him, spread out his arms with pride and exclaimed, “wallah!” Now Koons often takes photo-ops in that exact “wallah!” pose, inviting us to receive his works with a similarly childlike glee.
Wallah!
At age 62, Koons looks young and energetic. He’s busy promoting his work, through conferences, collaborations, and public works. He recently unveiled Seated Ballerina in Rockefeller Center in support of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children. He released his own line of Louis Vuitton bags, which are admittedly very tacky looking: purses with Rubens and Van Gogh paintings printed on, with a matching gold JK initial opposite the LV logo. He just unveiled a 40 foot tall Balloon Dog for Jay-Z’s festival tour. Koons’ mastery of the artist-as-celebrity role is impressive in a way unequaled since his childhood idol, Salvador Dali, captured the public eye with his eccentricity and mustache. But while Dali gained public notoriety through antics, Koons has elevated himself through careful—and to some, cynical—self-promotion.
One of Koons’ most recent work is his Gazing Ball series. He takes iconic sculptures and paintings—works by Titian, Raphael, Manet, and Da Vinci—carefully reproduce them, and then place a shiny, blue orb is in front of it. Like this:
I know what you’re thinking. The original Mona Lisa is indeed smaller than that.
Critics have predictably blasted this series as unoriginal, simple plagiarism, “a brilliant scam,” as one online commenter put it. There is something easy about it, something too effortless about putting a blue orb in front of old masterpieces. Still, this isn’t the first time that the Mona Lisa has be reappropriated by artists. Duchamp drew a funny mustache on the Da Vinci classic, making it into L.H.O.O.Q. Andy Warhol reproduced the painting onto colored silkscreen prints. For Koons, the gazing ball series is about “your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image.” The orb itself “represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now.” If that’s pretentious artspeak, then the Gazing Ball series at least brings freshness to the famous works it duplicates, giving the works a sense of nowness and renewed relevance.
“Art is a vehicle of acceptance,” Koons reiterates, again and again. It’s been his mantra since the beginning of his career: accepting materialism, accepting sexuality, accepting childhood fantasies, accepting history. And accepting yourself. Jeff Koons certainly has. “If you have vision, you can do anything,” he says. It sounds like truism, but for Koons, that’s how he lives and makes art. And while we can continue debating his vision, he’s realizing it, smiling all the way.
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