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IS it possible that the most characteristic artist of our time could also be almost entirely full of b.s.? From what I can tell, that’s exactly what we’ve got. Over the last week or so I’ve been underlining lines from Jed Perl’s New York Review of Books piece on the art world’s Gilded boy, thinking and talking about Perl’s argument, without yet posting the piece. “The Cult Jeff Koons” is really worth reading in full — there are subtleties I will not be able to convey here. So I will offer a few bits of the essay with hopes that readers will seek out the whole thing.
One of my main concerns: Does Koons critique or question our society the way substantial artists have? Or does he just amp up its worst qualities and sell it back to us?
Perl sees Koons — a retrospective is currently up at the Whitney in New York —
as a kind of smug, cheerful bully, someone whose cheerleaders suggest you have to like or risk being irrelevant, Puritanical, left behind by history, joyless, and so on. Here’s what Koons really is:
Koons is a recycler and regurgitator of the obvious, which he proceeds to aggrandize in the most obvious way imaginable, by producing oversized versions of cheap stuff in extremely expensive materials. It is only when he rejects the real in favor of the surreal that the audience’s interest begins to cool. In his recent paintings he has created what amount to photorealist collages, with inflatable toys, cartoon characters, classical statuary, and details of a woman’s hot-red lips or sexy head of hair layered and juxtaposed to create trippy Pop fantasy visions. These 3-D surrealist dreamscapes, with their echoes of Dalí—Koons cites Dalí as a major early influence on his work—are almost invariably said to be his weakest stuff. The public wants its Koons real rather than surreal. People want their Koons straight up, unadulterated. Koons is here to prove that in our been-there-done-that society metaphor and mystery and magic are dead and gone. It all comes down to familiarity.
And despite the fact that the Koons cult calls him the next step in Dada and an heir to Duchamp, Perl builds a rigorous art-historical argument and comes down this way:
The Koons retrospective is a multimillion-dollar vacuum, but it is also a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die… Koons’s overblown souvenirs are exactly what Duchamp warned against, a habit-forming drug for the superrich.
Now, much of the reason art-world types champion Koons (and some of these people are my friends, and one of them, Peter Schjeldahl, is one of my favorite critics) is that his work stirs people up so much — offends sensibilities, induces shock — that he must be good. It’s sort of the Lady Gaga argument: Elvis offended people, and he was great, Gaga does too — so she’s as good as Elvis. Perl puts his finger on this scam, after describing the way Matisse and Nijinsky scandalized audiences:
For the Gilded Age avant-garde, such legendary events have become the model for new marketing opportunities, and there is an assumption that if the public has a very strong negative reaction to something—if a work of art disturbs or annoys or flummoxes some of the public—it most likely is important. Incredibly enough, there are highly intelligent observers who believe that Koons challenges them in more or less the same way that Matisse, Picasso, Nijinsky, and Pollock might once have done.
Readers can probably guess how I come down on this. Perl makes the argument better than I could. But if you’re curious how I see Jeff Koons, and the adulation around him, fitting into our larger cultural situation and our current winner-take-all economy accompanying a protracted economic downturn, keep your eye out for my book Culture Crash, due in just a few months from Yale University Press.
“Art-world types”? Which art world are you referring to? Too many art writers, bloggers, and viewers today fall into the trap of talking about the “art world” as if it was just one entity.
The fact of the matter is that just within the NYC art world there is a plethora of art worlds.
One type of art world is the world that ultra conservative art writer Jed Perl wants everyone to believe in. Perl is a conservative critic who writes for the conservative New Republic and in one quote manages to diss Koons along with the likes of Matisse, Picasso, and Jackson Pollock. That’s a lot of dissing of major historical artists.
And who is this mysterious “public” Perl is talking about when he says ” the public has a very strong negative reaction to something”? Most people in the general public have never heard of Jeff Koons or Jed Perl for that matter.
Perl loves to find ways to bad mouth contemporary art. And the media loves to poke a stick at the big, flashy, blue chip art world as if it was THE art world. Your piece adds fuel to both of those fires. .
Richard, your point about multiple art worlds is well taken — although I think you may be making a parallel error when you speak of the “general public.”
I think you are being unfair to Mr. Perl, however. You misread the passage where he mentions Matisse, Pollock, and Picasso. He does not diss these artists; rather, he compares the widespread negative reaction that these artists originally faced to the (widespread though not universal) negative reaction that Koons continues to face. His point — and I think he is correct — is that is fallacious to treat Koons as a modern Picasso just because he is widely hated, And Koons is frankly just awful.
As for “ultra conservative,” that says more about you then it does about him.
Yesterday, I took a group of students on a field trip to the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte, NC. At one point in the tour, the docent chose to focus on a collaborative piece between Koons and another artist (forget his name) that focussed on Mahammid Ali (sp). The other artist’s contribution was a collection of photographs of Ali when he was young (they were good), while Koons piece consisted of an inflatable dolphin pool float, tire float and a stool. The docent proceeded to tell my group of impressionable middle school students how the Koons piece was symbolic of Ali. It was laughable, total b.s., and basically seemed at its core to be blatant dishonesty. This is what bothers me the most. I think any artwork that has the slightest hint of dishonesty is a failure. I feel like Koons is having a good laugh at everyone’s expense.
Very well said
I just want to thank Mr. Kooyman for pointing out that “art-world types” exist beyond New York City, beyond Koons, and beyond the interests of the mega rich. As a contributor to the art world, I have been concerned with regional watercolors and prints, contemporary craft, drawing, plein-air painting, mid-career contemporary artists, and so on.
Koons is perfect for our age: The mediocre talent that recycles another’s ideas (in a factory, no less — though I suppose that’s a relic of the industrial age), offering what his public perceives as his “twist” on the idea. I suppose in this case it’s his vulgar commercialism and passing off of bad taste as edgy art. And the public buys this crap because it gets the imprimatur of establishment museums like the Whitney. The issue isn’t conservative v. liberal tastes in art. It’s the inability of critics — and the public — to have the courage of their convinctions. Koons is a hack who’s not even fun. So what’s the point? Oh, I remember: money.
Hmmmn, did I say the artworld was monolithic, or that it was only based in New York? That would surprise me since I live in Los Angeles, where there is thriving museum/gallery/art-school/collector/etc infrastructure, Let me get back to the rest of this when I’ve got some caffeine in me,
There is an equally devastating attack on Koons by Eric Gibson in The New Criterion (“What Jeff Koons has wrought,” Sept. issue, available online).
Well said by Mr. Sacks.
Some quick thoughts:
The artworld is neither monolithic nor entirely based in New York. Like “inside the beltway,” the term is a generalization. Sarah Thornton’s book Seven Days in the Art World documents it quite well.
A minority of folks in this subculture don’t like or trust Koons’ work, but by virtually every indicator — money, prestige, museum space, etc, — he is one of its kings.
Jed Perl suspicious of some of today’s purportedly cutting edge work; this makes him “ultraconservative”?
He is hardly dissing Matisse, Picasso etc., but calling Koons a phony who does not deserve the comparisons.
What I dislike most about Koons is that his success makes the vast majority of Americans — who suspect that art is a silly little game by a bunch of outsiders — feel confirmed in their prejudices. It’s in part because I think that arts and (“the arts”) matter that I resent the man’s wildly overinflated career.
Most Americans either have no idea who Koons is or what city the Whitney is located in. Those that do probably like his Puppy or his ballon sculptures.
Besides just what is the damage Koons has supposedly caused in your mind? He makes a lot of money? We’ll let’s just include sports stars, rap moguls, Steven King, real estate developers, and Steve Jobs in that bitch. God forbid an ARTIST makes money! That he had a huge retrospective at the Whiteny? So what? Major museums have a variety of big shows and retrospectives.. That his work doesn’t look like it has enough skill (one of Perl’s complaints)? Oh please do you really want to have that old fashioned argument?
LOVE THIS!!!
Didn’t Frank Rich inform us, correctly, after the failed Clinton impeachment, that the culture war that started in the 60’s was now officially over? The winners were the post moderns with the underlying presupposition of materialistic determinism. And Jeff Koon’s art makes a lot of sense in this sort of culture. All of the icons have been “clast”, so to speak. If truth has lost its transcendent value, then inevitably so will art. The winners forgot to tell us about the unintended consequences of their victory. As James Sire has said, “existentialism is nihilism wearing a mask called value that is stripped away at death.”
Excellent points by Mr. Dodds!!
(I say this without being entirely convinced that the culture war is over. But still.)
I clicked through to the link about your book, then to your 2012 article. We want a culture that says that “art matters” and backs that up with action. But as I alluded to, we live in a culture that says you are free to pick your gender, but that also means that “art matters” and “art doesn’t matter” must be fundamentally equivalent statements. When we think about the high art of Old Europe that Mr. Plagens respects so much (as mentioned in your 2012 article), we should also realize that Europe was the center of Christianity for well over a millennia. Most Europeans believed that man was made in God’s image. Man was artistic and creative because God is the ultimate creative artist. That is a pretty strong cultural foundation for supporting artists. These sorts of connections, from presuppositions to resultant cultural expression, are eloquently discussed by Vishal Mangalwadi in “The Book That Made Your World ( How the Bible Created Western Civilization.)”
(I have no connection with that author)
To Mr. Dodds, I’ll say: I like where you’re going with this, but I’ll point out the obvious: That several of they heydays of the creative class in general and artists in specific were not monotheistic eras but rather pagan or humanistic periods — Golden Age Greece, the Renaissance, the post-Nietzsche years. And the most zealously Christian periods in Western history — the medieval period, the Puritan years in England — were not great times for artists.
The relationship between the arts and Christianity is a complex one and I don’t mean to oversimplify it.
Excellent points. I do not disagree. Whether mankind has a defensible world view to explain his constant desire to be creative or not, he shows us that he has a persistent drive to produce creative works.
Re Mr. Kooyman, Perl says it in his piece more eloquently than I can here, but in short: Jeff Koons is a rich, smug phony. I hardly think it’s good for artists and visual art in general to have someone like that as the most celebrated, publicized, and critically fawned over living American artist. The great mass of Americans already distrust the arts and artists as it is.
I don’t mean to keep harping on here but the point has to be made that you are just not being very factual. Koons may be one of a handful of contemporary artists that get’s written about by media a lot ( Maria Abramovic, Karen Walker, Luc Tuymans, Richard Serra get written up as much) but he is hardly by any strength of the imagination “fawned over” by critics. In fact of all of the people I mentioned he is the most chastised and pick upon.
Why does this matter? Because media and a conservative segment of society (of which I place Perl) is constantly looking for something or someone in the visual art world to hold up as the poster person of a scamming artists who is wasting our time and tax payers dollars. They love Koons because they can frame him as a scam. Which he isn’t.
Calling him a phony isn’t art criticism. It’s just name calling.
Is Vanity Fair — which did a big piece on Koons as a sexy, weight-lifting hero — one of America’s most conservative institutions? Are they framing him as a “scamming artist”?
And I’m not talking about the genuinely provocative and political artists — the Piss Christ types — who generate conservative opposition for the (usually tiny) public funding they’ve received. Koon is not political, does not get direct public funds — as I said, just a Gilded Age phony, a triumph of winner-take-all capitalism, canny marketing and our own celebrity obsession.
All of that can be described as showmanship or, at times, even over sensational. But self marketing and working with familiarity (Perls complaint) isn’t grounds to completely dismiss the man. And it’s not even a complete picture of the artists work. Calling Koons a phony because he gives the “public” something familiar completely misses the fact that Koons was criticized in the first part of his career because his work was too esoteric.
I’m not saying you have to like Koons. Maybe he isn’t your thing. I think his paintings tend to be boring. But I challenge you to come up with a much better reason for this hate that simply saying he’s “phony.” That doesn’t tell us anything.
How about this for a reason…. He steals other people’s imagery, hires other people to make them into art, and puts his name on it. Just look at the court records from his numerous intentional copyright infringements. Koons is nothing more than a “good” salesman peddling mediocre works to people with amounts of money no one deserves. That isn’t art, it’s late stage capitalism. I mean seriously, a chrome rabbit for $50m? Now if it had an axe stuck in its forehead from vandals destroying the sackler family funded museum that housed it…
I think the argument and the art world are not climbing up the right tree. If people want Koons so be it but in reality art and it’s history are much more that what can be crammed into a criticism about Koons. Firstly Modern art can be said to have been created in the early renaissance by Giotto. But a the 1st relics testify it was not just Giotto who created modern art but his students or pupils or children. Modern art does not encompass children the way the early renaissance did hence no renaissance today. So what is the big deal with Koons, he may be good or not, but as modern society and the futurists married trains and art why are not trains decorated in a systemic maner the way Miro and Calder and Herring decorated them. Why is not societyembracing train art to beautify the city cheaply in one stroke painting the outside as well as decorating the interior placcard spaces in a coordinated beautifyin g movement. I thin society has lost it’s track and is climbing the wrong tree. Not that Koons is a good or bad artist but he is like a grafitti artist and not a very prolific or significant one. I can imagine public works art as the more significant art but is not done in a societal way as not governor or mayor is even a little interested in the subject. Art to progress has to be a lot more available to everyone and not just famous people or artists for whatever art historical critical reason but a societal influence to decorate the city.
In the end….. Koons does not ‘make’ his pieces…. He conceives the ideas, has someone else produce the work, and then puts his name on it when it’s ready to be unveiled. To me, that is a fraud. If he did the actual work instead of a team of ‘assistants’, he would be deserving of the credit. An epic movie has credits at the end of it, Jeff Koons ‘work’ should give credit to the production crew that created his fiction.