Literature has a bad sex award. Despite stiff competition, this year Philip Roth walked away with it. If art offered something similar, Jeff Koons would be a shoe-in for lifetime achievement: From Made in Heaven from 1991.
Lifetime achievement for best sex in an art context?
Wayne Miller,
from The Way of Life of the Northern Negro, Chicago (embrace), 1946-48. Sixty-plus years later, nobody has topped it.
I think that Koons could get a lifetime achievement award for making a career out of not making art. Other people make the art and he markets it and pockets the profits. In fact, I thought he deserved the award for a*(&h@#$e artist (?) of the decade until even bigger posers came upon the scene.
Miller’s photo is still sexy, decades after it was made. It tells you just enough but leaves the mystery in. That’s a lesson that a lot of artists have yet to learn.
Her fingers pressing into his back is the best.
The “Made in Heaven” series is the worst Koons ever. I think his bunnies are pretty sexy though.
One of these artists is forgotten, and the other is the hottest of international stars. If we were judging by these two series alone, the reverse would be true.