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Deconstructing Jeff |
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In the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker Calvin Thomkins wrote a profile of Jeff Koons titled The Turnaround Artist. More than others, Koons was an entity that at one time really got under my skin as a prime example of what went wrong with the art world in the 80s and into the mid 90s. The New Yorker profile chronicles Koons’ history up to the present day and how, after a huge decline he is supposedly on his way back. The biggest blowout to his career resulted from the critical reaction to his Made in Heaven exhibition at the Sonnebend gallery in the 1991. The work comprised images and sculpture depicting Koons and his then wife Cicciolina in various pornographic poses. At the time she was Italy’s top porn goddess as well as a deputy in the Italian parliament (where else but Italy?). That show has a bit of personal irony attached to it for me. I attended the opening and had the extreme poor taste to crack open a beer I’d brought with me. I was quickly admonished by the gallery staff for doing such a tasteless thing even as I stood in front of oversized images of genitalia and explicit sex. It was the one thing I enjoyed about the show. |
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At first glance Koons seems to be an idiot savant for the way in which he presents banal images and then he makes strained connections to their greater meaning. But after awhile, the savant part vaporizes when you pay sole attention to the visual content. The major flaw and weakness with Koons’ art is its dependence on rhetoric - a patchwork of logic delivered with a gaudy line of patter - to complete the understanding. I’ve never cared much about what any artist has ever said about their work; I expect to get all the information I need from the visuals. But for Koons, the line of bullshit is a key component to what he does - that and, as with Warhol, a reliance on the cult of his persona. But Koons is also endowed with a talent for that particular American characteristic known as ‘salesmanship’, better defined here as self-promotion. In the Profile his personal history bears this out beginning |
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