Jeff Koons

This month's challenge featured Jeff Koons, an artist who tends to provoke strong reactions among critics. The challenge is still open - choose any work by Koons and send your review to the email in the right-hand column.

REVIEWS

Patricia Wilson Smith

Bouquet of Tulips, Paris, 2019.

In October 2019, Jeff Koons’ memorial sculpture Bouquet of Tulips was finally unveiled after three years of public debate. A giant hand offering a polychrome cluster of tulips, Koons’ trademark ‘balloon’ tulips have been likened to anuses on stems, the ‘Caucasian’ hand holding them a pallid nod to the Statue of Liberty gifted to the United States by France in 1886.

The sculpture was commissioned in 2015 by the then US Ambassador Jane Hartley, as a memorial for Paris in the wake of a string of terrorist attacks across France.  The proposal provoked complaints about its cost, its location and not least, its appropriateness. In 2018 the artwork was roundly attacked as a cynical piece of product placement. 

Jeff Koons makes an easy target for those cultural critics who reject his work as ‘Disney-esque’ and ‘kitsch’. But might this furore have been better directed at the commissioning committee who, we assume, spent some considerable time discussing the proposal? The balloon tulips, or ‘culipes’ as they came to be called, were not an unknown in France: in 2008 a tulips sculpture had been included in the hugely expensive Jeff Koons exhibition at the Palace of Versailles; an exhibition that attracted a barrage of criticism from the cultural elite, and drew smiles from his admirers.

Public art is a notoriously tricky thing to gauge. The Eiffel Tower was once described as a ‘hole-riddled suppository’; the Louvre extension was ‘atrocious’. The French may not love Tulips, but they certainly enjoyed the debate.  
P.W.S.

Miklos Legrady

Miklos Legrady's version of  Balloon Dog

I painted this balloon dog taking a dump, a small stainless steel paperweight, because Jeff Koons is a modernist. I took his idea one step further into postmodernism, which is always a little bit nasty or self-destructive. Of course Koons did it first. That makes mine a linguistic exercise while his was a cultural statement. He said “The more anxiety you can remove, the more free you are to make that gesture, whatever the gesture is.”

Jeff Koons tells us that when he was nine years old, his father would place old master paintings copied and signed by his son in the window of his shop in an attempt to attract visitors.  As a young adult he worked as senior staff at MOMA, and in 1980 got licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks.  From that moment on, he was on the path to success, able to finance his own work. 

Others disagree, and in 2010 Gerg Allen dug deep into Koons’ past. Koons was in vacuum-cleaner sales as early as 1979-80, his stockbroker jobs lasting weeks, not years. His breakout solo show at International with Monument, ‘Equilibrium’ (with basketballs, Nike ads, cast-metal scuba gear and life rafts), came in 1985.

So we have a love of beauty, a call for status, and rather superficial morals. The genius of one’s talent does not guarantee an honest nobility. Although Koons’ work is the apex of beauty, it’s superficial because Koons is shallow.  
M.L.

Josephine Gardiner

 From the 'Made in Heaven' series

Most articles on Jeff Koons begin by highlighting the insane prices his works fetch (and yes, I know what I’ve done here), rather than the work. Which is a pity, because the more interesting discussion - about what on earth he is trying to do - is pushed aside. Would Koons provoke such passionate loathing in art critics if works like Balloon Dog, for instance, sold for £500 or £5,000 rather than £58 million? Probably not; Koons’ reputation is mired in the swamp of his own wealth – any claims he might make to be holding a (gilded) mirror to vapid consumer culture, or to be transfiguring the commonplace, are emasculated by the fact that his creations are toys for billionaires. You could – almost - feel sorry for him.

The first work I ever saw by Koons was a series of retouched photos and ceramic statuettes titled ‘Made in Heaven’, featuring the artist having sex with his then wife, Ilona Staller. They were enjoyably shocking (this was the 1990s, long before Instagram and the Kardashians), not just because seeing porn-mag images presented as art was a surprise, but because everything about the works – the ice-cream colours, the insouciant disregard for ‘good taste’ – had a transgressive, punkish newness. In the image above, the couple pose on a pink satin sheet, menaced by giant butterflies which have escaped off a Hallmark greeting card. A window is open, the night sky full of drifting feathers, like a scene from Peter Pan; Koons looks directly at the camera, his expression serenely unreadable, while Staller pouts downward at his face. This one is about Jeff, not Ilona, though she is perhaps the more interesting character: a porn star who became an Italian MP and once offered to sleep with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace in the Middle East – a braver and more honourable strategy than ‘shock and awe’. 

The ‘Made in Heaven’ series had an unironic innocence about it when it first appeared. Here, and in other work, Koons seemed to be asking us to look squarely at the despised artefacts of commercial culture, posing a legitimate question about art (what is kitsch and why, and when does emotion become ‘sentimental’?). Thirty years later, though, he is still asking the same, very profitable, question.  
J.G.