Jeff Koons: Art and Celebrity excerpts (2003)
Here we turn our attention to Art Star Jeff Koons.
Jeff Koons was born in 1995 and raised in the town of York, Pennsylvania. Because of his business acumen and enthusiasm for popular culture, Koons is widely regarded as Warhol’s heir. He knows all about selling himself because he was the son of a businessman who owned a furniture store and designed interiors, and a mother who sold wedding dresses. Before he became a full-time artist, Koons worked as a membership salesman for New York’s Museum of Modern Art and as a commodities broker on Wall Street. As a boy, Koons enjoyed drawing and painting; his father even exhibited and sold examples of his work in the furniture store. Koons liked Dali’s work and learning the Spaniard was in New York, Koons telephoned him and amazingly, Dali agreed to a meeting. His art school training took place during the early 1970s at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore and at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. At the latter, the Chicago imagist artist Ed Paschke influenced him and encouraged an interest in readymades and pop culture. Koons moved to New York in 1977 and adopted an objective manner of working rather than a subjective one.
During the 1980s, Jeff Koons was part of a movement called neo-geo. In his case, it meant the presentation of new consumer goods such as Spalding basketballs and Hoover vacuum cleaners in glass cases, and the casting of inflatable bunny toys and model trains in stainless steel. Koons, “the ideas man”, used readymades or delegated the making of his sculptures to others such as Italian craftsmen who carved enlarged wooden figures of pink panthers, bears with policemen and a couple holding a string of puppies from photographs and postcards supplied by the artist. (By 2000, he occupied a huge studio in New York where many assistants laboured under his direction making sculptures and billboard-size paintings with the aid of computers.) The porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his chimp made in Italy has already been described, as has “koonspeak”, the salesman’s patter or “New Age waffle” Koons developed for publication and interviews; for example: “By some I am viewed as a sinner but I am really a saint, God has always been on my side… I have my finger on the eternal.” [1]
To market himself via the art press, Jeff Koons appeared in staged, full-colour photo/adverts for his own exhibitions along with pigs and nubile young women wearing bikinis (Art Magazine Ads, 1988-89, photos taken by Greg Gorman). Koons has expressed admiration for advertising because it is generally positive and optimistic. He seeks to communicate the same values via his art. The optimism of his art is as compulsory as that of socialist realism in the USSR during the 1930s. Appropriating the trademarked products and copyrighted photographs of others led to well-publicised legal proceedings for plagiarism. Perhaps Koons thought the risk and the fines were worth it for the free publicity it generated. Damien Hirst subsequently employed similar tactics.
Reference:
[1] Robert Rosenblum and Jeff Koons. (1992). The Jeff Koons handbook. (London: Thames & Hudson/Anthony d’Offay Gallery), pp. 36, 39.
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