JEFF KOONS

A RETROSPECTIVE
SCOTT ROTHKOPF
With contributions by
ANTONIO DAMASIO, JEFFREY DEITCH, ISABELLE GRAW,
ACHIM HOCHDRFER, MICHELLE KUO, RACHEL KUSHNER,
PAMELA M. LEE, AND ALEXANDER NAGEL
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK
DISTRIBUTED BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
THE MOST
From the beginning, Jeff Koons provoked superlatives.
Mere adjectives seemed insufcient to describe the jolt of
his art and soon him. As early as 1983, just three years
after his public debut, critic Roberta Smith described his
works presence as one of the strangest and most
unique of contemporary art practice, and only months
later, poet Alan Jones declared that practice one of the
most consistent programs of high voltage art-making
going on today.
1
By the end of the decade, Koons was
hailed as the most incisive commentator of the age,
as well as the hottest young artist in America and the
maker of its most shocking art.
2
This last sentiment was
given personal resonance in 1993 by Robert Rosenblum,
who wrote, Koons is certainly the artist who has most
upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the
last decade.
3
That the veteran art historian could com-
pare this disturbance to his initial encounter with the art
of Jasper Johns, which he had been among the rst to
champion, makes these words even more or perhaps
the most forceful.
The list goes on: the ultimate entrepreneur of the
new art market (a year after his solo gallery debut in
1985); one of the worlds most bankable artists (just
six years later); the producer of the most expensive art
work by a living artist ever to sell at auction (in 2013,
when Balloon Dog [Orange] broke the record a different
Koons sculpture had set once before).
4
Writing of another
of Koonss canines, critic Jerry Saltz lauded Puppy as the
most purely pleasurable public sculpture Ive ever seen,
while New Yorker columnist Peter Schjeldahl called it
hands down, the most richly and subtly painterly sculp-
ture ever made. These remarks seem modest when
compared to those of Susan Freedman, the president
of New Yorks Public Art Fund, who extolled the topi-
ary terrier as one of the most signicant sculptures of
the twentieth century.
5
Koons himself has been called
the most inuential and arguably the most impor-
tant artist of his generation, as well as the most mis-
understood.
6
Yet for some this generational context has
proved too conning; Koons is the most subversive artist
alive today or one of the art worlds most famous and
controversial gures.
7
And in the eyes of at least one
writer, his achievement could not rightly be limited to the
art world, when the whole world might be a more tting
stage for one of the most famous and popular artists on
this planet.
8
One imagines that if the presence of extra-
terrestrial life is ever denitively conrmed, this frame
might expand further still.
Such superlatives cut both ways. Koons has also
been dubbed nothing less than the most active par-
ticipant in the debasement of art.
9
And even the effu-
sive examples cited above were not always proffered as
praise, nor would those that were be universally taken as
such. As far as art and artists are concerned, shock, fame,
expense, controversy, subversiveness, and ambition are
certainly not accepted unanimously as virtues. Finally, it
must be said that not one of these claims (apart from the
Balloon Dogs auction record) could be veried as true.
They may be hyperbole, opinion, generalization, mutu-
ally negating, or some combination thereof. But my point
in marshaling these assertions is not to test their veracity
so much as to marvel at the fact that Koons prompted
their existence in such great number, on such diverse
topics, and over such a long period of time. At the risk
of another hyperbolic generalization, Id wager that no
artist of the past thirty years has inspired more mosts. This
alone is enough to make Koons worth thinking about. But
what exactly makes him such an exceptional case?
Koons, I would argue, has been such a durable and
ineluctable force in the art world in part because he has
tested its limits and those of what art and an artist can
be. Picture the eld of contemporary artistic production
as a vast terrain, the porous perimeter of which is marked
by numerous stakes circumscribed by an elastic cord.
Each post represents the outer limit of a term or condi-
tion germane to art making today exhibition practice,
the market, the readymade, narrative, craft or industrial
fabrication, an artists sincerity or cunning, the inheri-
tance of Pop or Minimalism, or the explosion of celebrity
and hype, among many more. Although these terms or
NO LIMITS

SCOTT ROTHKOPF
15
conditions predated Koons, in each case he moved the
stakes farther out on the eld, expanding the boundary
in which all art occurs. We now for better or worse all
stand within that distended arena. Koons struck down old
limits and established new ones that are often impossible
for his successors to attain, much less supersede, which
is not to suggest they should aspire to. Some might try;
some might know better; others might turn their backs
on this periphery entirely. But still it remains in mind, a
frontier borderland, both mythic and real, alluring and
forbidding, full of risk and reward.
A retrospective such as the one this catalogue
accompanies offers a chance to take full measure of
an artists work. Although Koons has been the subject
of many exhibitions bringing together the multifarious
parts of his oeuvre, none has attempted to assemble
them into as comprehensive a narrative since the one
organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
in 1992, just thirteen years into a career that now spans
nearly thrice that number. In charting Koonss lifework,
the present exhibition resituates his many icons within
the context of the complex and multifaceted series in
which they originated, and also demonstrates how those
series might together form a cohesive if diverse whole.
The plate section that forms the core of this volume sug-
gests the arc of that narrative, adhering to the unusually
precise rubric by which Koons has organized his bodies
of work. Each series is accompanied by an appendix of
sorts that elaborates a constellation of reference points:
process images, source material, and installation pho-
tographs. The plates are followed by a series of essays
that are intended not to recapitulate the totality of this
story, which has been recounted elsewhere, but rather
to illuminate various aspects of Koonss practice and the
disparate contexts in which it might be considered.
10
To
that end, their authors represent a wide range of disci-
plines, from scholars and critics of Renaissance and con-
temporary art to a novelist and a neuroscientist. Taken
together, they offer a sense of Koonss broad reverbera-
tions within the realm of art and beyond.
Few artists, living or dead, have had such reach.
My aim in this essay is to examine that scope through
a series of interrelated case studies hinged on the sen-
sibilities Koons has challenged, the high wires he has
traversed, the conceptual gambits he has offered, and
the peerless objects on which these maneuvers depend.
It is impossible in the space provided here to offer a com-
prehensive account of Koonss achievement and inu-
ence, the latter being particularly difcult to assess given
that his singular example can be daunting to emulate
and even, at times, a cautionary tale. Koons has pushed
arts limits, sometimes to uncomfortable ends. He has
challenged the art worlds critical pieties, and in the pro-
cess has been described both as a symptom of our age
and as one of its architects. Saying as much risks align-
ing him with some of the less salubrious forces at play in
the art world and the world beyond, two spheres he has
consistently endeavored to enmesh. Early in his career
he spoke of the contemporary artists limited cultural
power relative to that of the pop star or the designer of
a Baroque church a narrow purview that he hoped his
work might transcend.
11
He has certainly done this, in
part through his individual artworks, and in part through
his personal and professional conduct. It is impossible
to deny that Koonss art and career stand as a series of
limit cases, and this, nally, may be what matters about
him most.
ART AND THINGS
One could tell nearly the whole story of Koonss art and
of the art of the past century more generally through
the lens of the readymade, so it makes a good place
to begin. Since Marcel Duchamp rst exhibited his uri-
nal in 1917, few artists have been as associated with
that gesture or have grappled with it as variously as has
Koons. At one extreme, he has displayed unadulterated
found objects as his own, and at the other, he has made
painstaking replicas of such things. Between those poles
he has explored so many approaches to the readymade
that we could say it acts as a kind of lodestar in Koonss
practice, even when he seems to stray from its light. This
wasnt always the case. As a student at the Maryland
Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, Koons primarily
made neo-Surrealist paintings of dream imagery, some
16
Untitled etching from Koonss undergraduate studies at the
Maryland Institute College of Art, 1974
No Limits
veering toward nightmares featuring brightly colored
severed limbs. If these paintings were indebted to the
imagined concoctions of Koonss hero Salvador Dal and
to his Chicago Imagist teachers Karl Wirsum, Jim Nutt,
and Ed Paschke, Koons recalls that even then Paschke
urged him to turn outward, revealing to the young artist
that everything is already here in the world and you just
have to look for it.
12
In November 1976 Koons set forth. He heard the
siren song of New York emanating from the radio in
the voice of Patti Smith and he hitchhiked there the
next day. Shortly after relocating in January 1977, he
got a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern
Art, where he remembers encountering a broad new
range of aesthetic ideas, including the post-Minimal
sculpture of Robert Smithson and Jackie Winsor, the
Photoconceptualism of Bill Beckley, and the objects dis-
played in the galleries of architecture and design. The
New York art world of the late 1970s was awash in plural-
ism, with a multitude of options yet to be codied accord-
ing to the more decisive ideologies and battle lines of
the decade to come. Koons explored the Punk and New
Wave music scenes at CBGB and the Mudd Club, and
he met fellow artists Julian Schnabel and David Salle,
the latter of whom was a link to the emerging Pictures
Generation.
13
This group, which included Sherrie Levine
and Richard Prince, was rekindling conversations around
the readymade via the appropriation of found imagery
and would be credited with interrogating and subverting
the power of media images while leaving them largely
intact. In retrospect, however, much of their works
energy derives from the sex appeal and magnetism of
the material it purportedly critiqued, an irony that was
not lost on Koons, who began to exploit found objects of
a similar if distinct species to even more alluring ends.
Cumulatively, these various exposures and contacts had
a chilling and hardening effect on Koonss nascent art. It
became less expressive, more Pop, more deadpan, more
directed toward the outer world than the inner one. His
hand would never be evident in his work again.
Koons has long accorded Duchamp pride of place in
this shift: My process of distancing myself from subjective
art continued through the late 70s, which included expo-
sure to Marcel Duchamp. He seemed the total opposite
of the subjective art I had been immersed in. It was the
most objective statement possible, the readymade.
14
At
rst, Koons pursued this new interest in the readymade in
elaborate sculptures and wall reliefs made from colorful
inatable toys, gurines, and tacky synthetic trimmings
that he purchased on Fourteenth Street, Broadway, and
the Lower East Side and used to turn his East Village
apartment into a riotous installation (no. 6, p. 43). He
soon pared down this baroque vocabulary, positioning
the inatable ora and fauna in sparer arrangements
against mirrored and transparent acrylic tiles in sculptures
that forged a perverse marriage of Pop and Minimalism
(pls. 1, 2, 4, 5). Some of these works survive, but most
served as ephemeral setups to be photographed and
rearranged, a strategy he borrowed from Conceptual
art. Koonss rst mature works certainly resonate with
those of his aforementioned contemporaries and of
Haim Steinbach, who was then also vigorously engaged
with the readymade.
15
Koonss sculptures, however, are
distinguished by their cheery if impersonal affect (long
before the neo-Pop mania of the East Village scene) and
by their greater sense of physical contingency, both of
which have remained hallmarks of his art. The mirrors
reect their surroundings and viewers, while the inat-
able toys embody a sense of life implicitly shadowed by
the threat of detumescence. In Koonss hands, the ready-
made became, over the next three decades, an improb-
able poetic vehicle through which to conjure states of
equilibrium and instability, fullness and emptiness, joy
and disgust, life and death the prosaic objects of the
outer world made lapidary mirrors of our inner ones.
In 1979 Koons began a series of wall reliefs compris-
ing store-bought appliances, such as a toaster and deep
fryer, attached to uorescent xtures before which they
appear magically to oat (pls. 69). These works, like all
of Koonss sculptures, are not strictly speaking ready-
mades, since they involve the combination of multiple
17
Hanging Double-Sided Mirror with Wall Mirror and Inatable
Flowers (Tall Yellow, Tall Purple), 1978. Vinyl, mirrors,
and plastic, approx. 26 x 12 x 18 in. (66 x 30.5 x 45.7 cm)
Scott Rothkopf
elements. But in contrast to the tradition of assemblage,
they so insistently foreground a banal and unadulterated
thing pushing it before us, bathing it in light that they
retrieve something of the raw force latent in Duchamps
initial gesture. Their subjects are objects. Humble yet
endowed with an aura of reverent fascination, they re-
imagine traditional still lifes for the General Electric age.
Nevertheless, Koons still worried that his chosen prod-
ucts had been too manipulated violated, even in the
process of being bolted to their supports. He feared he
wasnt preserving the integrity of the object, a prob-
lem he sought to obviate in his breakthrough series,
The New.
16
This body of work also began with luminous
reliefs (this time featuring vacuum cleaners), but now the
appliances were left completely unmolested (pls. 1012).
Koons soon made this purity more evident by presenting
the machines forever sealed from the world in freestand-
ing, lambent, acrylic cases that preserve and intensify
the vacuums virginal state (pls. 1518, 21, 22). As with
Duchamps urinal, these products have clear anthropo-
morphic and sexual associations, with pliant trunks, suck-
ing orices, and bags that inate and deate like lungs.
Most important, however, is their aura of newness, which
remains almost paradoxically everlasting even as they
age within their aseptic incubators. Like insects trapped
in amber or specimens pickled in formaldehyde, they
become emblems of immortality as well as its inverse.
We could say that Koonss fascination with the ready-
made is really an outgrowth of his fascination with things,
particularly those made by industry to enhance and acces-
sorize our lives, along with the advertising images meant
to convince us of this effect. Accordingly, the principal
sculptural problem of his career up until 1984 was one
of presentation: how to involve these inviolate objects in
artworks as compelling as the products they comprised,
how to catch them like reies in jars that might set off
rather than extinguish their inner light.
17
His emphasis
was on amplifying an objects quiddity its voice, he
would say through a framing device even more puis-
sant than a pedestal or an artists incantatory designation
of an object as art. Koons has attributed this sensitivity
to childhood memories of the displays and wares of his
fathers home decor store, Henry J. Koons Decorators,
where he witnessed rsthand the power of merchandise
to tell stories and seduce.
18
Later in his career, the artists
approach to found objects would take on a messianic
tone, with Koons declaring that the readymade carried
a message of acceptance, because things are perfect just
as we nd them, and he therefore took great pains not
to screw them up. One visitor to his Chelsea apartment
in 1980 recalls confronting a complete Pullman-style
kitchen unit standing in an otherwise empty living room,
its owner paralyzed with uncertainty as to how to improve
upon its readymade perfection.
19
Koons arrived at the most extreme manifestation
of this presentational strategy in his 1985 exhibition
Equilibrium at the East Village gallery International With
Monument (nos. 1, 2, p. 72). He conceived the show as
a multilayered allegory concerning unattainable states
of being, with basketballs levitating inside aquarium
tanks, cast otation devices that would kill rather than
save, and a group of unaltered Nike basketball posters
whose stars he saw as sirens beckoning young people
(especially African Americans) with the promise of social
mobility (pls. 2332).
20
The posters, in particular, hewed
more closely than ever to Duchamps model and upped
the ante in the then high-stakes game of appropriation
art. Critic Alan Jones remarked at the time that they
teeter dangerously at the outer limits of found imag-
ery, a high compliment given how increasingly difcult
aesthetic peril and boundaries are to nd.
21
Id hazard
that the danger and discovery here comes from
the weird compulsion one feels to locate in these post-
ers some telltale evidence of the artists effort, which is
hardly an impulse elicited at this late date by Duchamps
shovel. We keep imagining that they cant be just post-
ers, that Koons must have done something other than
simply put them in frames, and this perplexity owes in
part to the fact that they havent undergone the aesthetic
ennoblement of obvious misuse. Duchamp at least had
the decency to emphasize his transmutative powers by
using a urinal or shovel other than as they were intended
(which is to say as sculpture), but the Nike posters func-
tion precisely as they should (which is to say hanging on
a wall, awaiting our regard). Koons did, indeed, bring
the readymade to its outer limits, reclaiming for it a
confusion and danger by doing so little with it, by des-
ignating a printed thing already so physically art-like
as art. This tension recurs throughout his subsequent
career, from his repurposed gurines to his casts of casts
of classical sculptures (pls. 13034).
Precisely as Koons arrived at this limit, his engage-
ment with the readymade began to shift from the prob-
lem of presentation to that of representation. It was as
though in whittling the former approach to the quick,
he was compelled to push off in the latter direction. In
this sense, the Equilibrium series can be seen as a pivot
that contains both Koonss purest readymades and his
rst experiments with ersatz ones, which led him to be
grouped with a number of his contemporaries under
the banner of simulation art.
22
Examples include the
cast-bronze Aqualung, Lifeboat, and Snorkel Vest, all
of which confer a state of permanent inatedness on
their otherwise unstable subjects (pls. 27, 32). Here the
18
No Limits
casting process supplants framing or display as Koonss
chief editorial inection, so that the replicated products
elegantly contain within themselves a new metaphori-
cal surplus: The heavy material that grants his otation
devices eternal life also makes them baleful imagoes.
They feel at once distant from our world yet strikingly
present in it, performing their metamorphosis from use-
ful objects to symbolic ones.
A similar operation is at play in Koonss subsequent
two series, Luxury and Degradation and Statuary (pls.
3351), but here he turned away from Duchamps and
his own precedent of selecting merely useful objects
(a shovel, a raft) in favor of those distinguished not by
what they are for but by who they are for, in curator
John Caldwells pithy phrasing. A Baccarat crystal set
and a collectible porcelain train full of bourbon are both
vessels for holding alcohol. Yet, as Caldwell observed
of Koonss new subjects, Their primary quality is their
appeal, their look, their design, instead of the work
they are expected to perform, and thus they are highly
charged and meant to fulll emotional and psychologi-
cal needs or desires.
23
Koons threw these attributes into
high relief by casting his models in glistening stainless
steel, a material that makes them even more enchant-
ing and literally reective of their covetous consumers.
Robbed of its use value, a leather travel bar replete with
bottles and implements becomes a compacted allegory
of attainment, vice, and dying customs while evoking
the aspiring gentleman who might once have carried it
(or longed to). There is a brutal chill about these works,
a sense of capitalisms cheering ctions laid bare. They
were made in New York during the mid-1980s, a place
and a time in which such nakedness had lost its embar-
rassment. The ice cubes hit the steel tumblers with a
stultifying clang rather than a gratifying ting.
Koons has a sixth sense for making ordinary things
blossom into archetypes. His secret, at the time, lay in
his ability to harmonize the specic and the generic in
both his selection of subjects and his casting of them.
With regard to the former, he is a connoisseur of objects
that suggest a kind of thing but not anything in particu-
lar. Italian Woman, for example, typies a certain kind
of art from a certain time without being a recognizable
masterpiece (pl. 47). Many viewers will identify Bob Hope
19
Showroom in the decorating store of Jeffs father, Henry Koons, York, Pennsylvania
Scott Rothkopf
as the subject of one of Koonss sculptures (pl. 45), but
few will know its specic source (no. 3, p. 96). This qual-
ity is intensied by virtue of Koonss casting. On the one
hand, his sculptures are so replete in their ne detail that
they suggest their models original materials and draw us
into a slow delectation of their precisely articulated parts.
On the other, they lack particularities, such as color, that
might localize or limit a viewers associations. The tension
between the Rabbits blank face and its minute modeling is
a key to the sculptures mesmerizing capacity to incite and
absorb our seemingly limitless projections (pl. 49). It is a
faceless orator, a helmeted spaceman, a Playboy Bunny,
a totem of Resurrection. Like all the works in Statuary, it
is also a representation of a representation: a sculpture
of a toy in the guise of a rabbit.
24
Indeed, if Koons had
begun his love affair with the readymade by presenting
real things, then shifted to depicting them, he was now
representing real things representing other things a
double remove that catches within its crosshairs the infra-
thin distinction between an object and a work of art.
After Statuary, the readymade vanished from
Koonss art for nearly two decades. He has attributed this
absence to a traumatic experience in 1987 while mak-
ing Kiepenkerl, which he conceived as a perfect stain-
less-steel replica of a beloved bronze statue in Mnster
that depicts a folk-hero peddler (pl. 52). The work was
badly damaged during casting and required last-minute
radical plastic surgery before its debut in the citys
prestigious decennial sculpture exhibition (nos. 20, 22,
p. 99) an episode, he recalls, that liberated him from
a slavish adherence to found objects, which in turn freed
him from casting in metal.
25
But with his Popeye series,
begun in 2002, the readymade resurfaced with mind-
boggling vehemence (pls. 106 13). Now, rather than
transmogrify a found object into a sculpture by conspicu-
ously translating it from one material into another, Koons
sought to conceal this metamorphosis entirely behind a
faultless similitude rarely achieved in the history of art.
The cast-aluminum and hand-painted menagerie of pool
toys that populate this body of work are stunning feats of
artice, exhibiting crimps and puckers along their seams
so carefully rendered they would make even those of
Rabbit seem downright primitive. This trompe loeil qual-
ity is heightened by the laborious paint handling that
perfectly emulates the subtle textural distinctions of the
original oats, from their lustrous vinyl to their matte
printing to their glossy handles and valves. These works,
of course, draw on a lineage that dates from Johnss ale
cans and Andy Warhols Brillo boxes to similarly decep-
tive sculptures by the likes of Robert Gober and Peter
Fischli and David Weiss.
26
Yet close attention to any of
these precedents reveals them to be something other
than what they purport, and their meaning as artworks
derives in part from the way the artist, while cleverly
aping industry, always shows his hand.
Koonss surfaces, by contrast, never give away the
game, although, as we have seen, he is equally inter-
ested in the problem of representation. Each work in
Popeye and the subsequent series, Hulk Elvis, is a medi-
tation on the essence of depiction, a point emphasized
by Koonss frequent use of doubling, as in the pair of
inatables in Seal Walrus (Trashcans) (pl. 111). We would
never know that Koonss indefectible doppelgngers
are not the real thing were they not often juxtaposed
with real things that both challenge and heighten their
illusionism. A hanging chain of inatable monkeys, for
example, supports a wooden chair that would other-
wise topple the group, while the duo of inatable seals
hold their pressure despite being penetrated by a pair of
metal trashcans. Such miraculous feats might be mere
sight gags were they not so crucial to these sculptures
reexive concern with mimesis. That the toys appear to
maintain their buoyancy their rictus grins in the face of
harm only augments their preternatural sense of life-
likeness. This is nowhere truer than in Hulk (Rock), where
a awlessly rendered life-size inatable Hulk supports
a marble boulder on his shoulders (pl. 118). Betting
its subject, the gure exudes a supernatural poise, and
the more one looks at it, the more one starts to wonder
whether, in fact, the rock might be fake and the Hulk
might be real (a double take elicited by other works fea-
turing natural elements such as logs and owers). But
it is the very notion of the real that Koons seems bent
on probing through sculptures that act as taut semantic
puzzles, appealing at once to our perceptual and logical
faculties. These works trafc in the confrontation and
confusion between the authentic and the delusive, the
manufactured and the handcrafted, the durable and the
evanescent, the cheery and the brutal, the natural and
the made.
It is perhaps ironic that the readymade, a century
after its birth, would come to this a dead ringer for
a polka-dotted inatable marine mammal. After all,
Duchamp revealed that the only essential ingredient
of an artwork is an artists designation of it as such,
while Koonss recent clones are the result of countless
hours and dexterous hands. And if Duchamp claimed
that he selected his objects because of his indifference
to them, Koons chooses his precisely for their narrative
and emotional charge. But we could also say that with
these sculptures the readymade has come full circle, and
so has Koons. Already for the Pop artists of the 1960s
the readymade served less as a strict model than as a
conceptual license to translate the dross of the everyday
20
No Limits
world into art via handmade if deadpan representations
of comic books and ads. Koons has pushed their prec-
edent to an absurdly logical conclusion, both upping and
vanishing their manual investment, while closing the
loop from the found object to its facsimile. A work like
Liberty Bell (pl. 121), which perfectly imitates its subject
in exactly the same materials as the original, achieves
the dream of an objective art that set Koons on his
early path from the presentation to the representation
of found things. Indeed, if the readymade absolves the
artist of every subjective decision (apart from the choice
of object and the mode of display), so, too, does the aim
of assiduous replication.
27
Koons may be Duchamps
greatest student or his greatest misinterpreter. He looked
to old-fashioned values like labor, skill, and illusionism
in order to turn the readymade on its head, making it
strange and forcefully new again.
STANDARDS OF TASTE
Koonss interest in the readymade developed hand-in-
hand with his fascination for two general classes of stuff:
industrially made objects with and without a practical
function. Early in his career he largely devoted himself
to the former, but Luxury and Degradation witnessed a
shift in emphasis, as useful things such as pails and ice
buckets began to commingle with less useful ones like
miniature automobiles and train sets full of bourbon.
Based on a porcelain and plastic collectible, Jim Beam
J. B. Turner Train brilliantly encapsulates this distinction,
since Koons claimed that the work would be destroyed
if the bourbon inside were ever consumedan action
that would literally turn the sculpture into a used good
(pl. 40).
28
But the train is haunted by another threat to art
that here is held elegantly if tenuously at bay: the specter
of kitsch. The term is a highly loaded one, fraught with
specic and pernicious historical associations. We might
use it in this context to describe things that seem like art
but arent, the tacky images and gewgaws that decorate
our lives and play to our emotions without challenging
them. If art is an icebreaker that opens new and unknown
channels of thought, kitsch sails in its wake, exploiting the
lowest common denominator of received ideas.
Koonss rened eye for such unrened pictures and
trinkets was put keenly to use in Statuary, a term that
itself suggests a borderland just outside the domain of
sculpture (pls. 45 51). If Luxury and Degradation took as
its subjects useful and useless things (and those midway
between), Statuarys tension lay in the duality between
gurative objects that might and might not properly be
called art. On the former side, we nd Louis XIV and
Italian Woman; on the latter lie the shrunken Bob Hope
and the ribald Doctors Delight. Koons amplied and
scrambled this distinction by casting all his sources in
stainless steel, which he prized for its sense of proletar-
ian luxury.
29
Yet, ironically, it was this metal most com-
mon to appliances that turned his lowbrow sources into
highbrow art. Just imagine these sculptures in bronze
and youll get a sense of Koonss gift for materials. While
that alloy worked for the transubstantiation of a snorkel,
it would not have done the trick on a mermaid troll, since
bronze is just the sort of ne-art medium on which kitsch
purveyors prey. Only a double negative could raise these
tchotchkes up the ladder of cultural value.
This phrasing brings us to the worn terrain of high
and low, a dichotomy that no matter how contested,
abraded, and possibly outmoded it may seem remains
a handy and intuitive gauge.
30
By now we stand neck
deep in brackish water from the conuence of those
two currents, and Koons has played a signal role in the
recent history of their admixture. The 1980s represented
a high-water mark in this process, with artists such as
Julia Wachtel, Kenny Scharf, and Koonss early dealer
Meyer Vaisman exploring hokey cartoon imagery in New
York, while on the West Coast Mike Kelley plumbed the
infernal depths of suburban childhood and even turned
to stuffed animals around the same time that Koons did.
These artists, like Koons, were indebted to the American
Pop masters of the 1960s, though the earlier generation
tended to work with materials and formats that might
elevate their pop-cultural samplings more decisively
into the realm of art. (Warhols silkscreening of found
images, however, does rhyme with Koonss double-
negative strategy.) Furthermore, despite their fondness
for movies and product packaging, these earlier artists
tended not to get too mixed up with kitsch, a term that
doesnt really apply to things like advertising and comic
books, which demonstrate no pretense toward being
anything other than the mass-cultural artifacts they are.
Koons went to the scarier heart of the matter with
his 1988 series Banality, which he unveiled almost simul-
taneously at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Donald
Young in Chicago, and Max Hetzler in Cologne (no. 8,
p. 115). After his experience with Kiepenkerl freed him
from his readymade sources, he was able to unleash
his connoisseurs eye for kitsch with even greater aban-
don, creating sculptural mash-ups based on stuffed
animals, Capodimonte and Hummel gurines, plush
toys, and imagery purloined from magazines, greet-
ing cards, product packaging, advertisements, lms,
and even Leonardo da Vinci (pls. 57, 68). Nothing was
too corny, too cloying, too cute. In fact, by enlarging his
sources and rendering them in suspect materials such as
21
Scott Rothkopf
polychromed wood and gilt porcelain with the help,
respectively, of Oberammergau wood carvers and Italian
ceramicists Koons made the treacly monstrous and
malevolent. He even had these craftsmen sign his sculp-
tures, a mark of canned originality few high-minded
artists had employed since the days of Barnett Newman.
For all this apparent omnivorous recklessness,
as with his previous bodies of work, Koons conceived
Banality as a nely calibrated allegory, this one aimed at
exculpating us from our most unreconstructed tastes. It
was OK, he insisted, not to put away our childish things,
whether they were the plush toys of the county fair or
the curios perched on our grandparents shelves. In
the Banality series I started to focus on my dialogue
about people accepting their own histories, he later
explained. I was just trying to say that whatever you
respond to is perfect, that your history and your own
cultural background are perfect.
31
Koonss gospel of
absolution involved a pair of defanged serpents from
the Garden of Eden, John the Baptist to christen us in
banality, and a doleful Buster Keaton as Christ entering
Jerusalem attended by the Holy Spirit in the form of a
cartoon birdie (pl. 54). Summoning prelapsarian inno-
cence, a silky-skinned nude girl and boy gaze at a heart-
shaped anthurium with an enormous phallic spadix,
while bodacious babes conjure an unrepentant id (pls.
6062).
32
The smiling Winter Bears and mawkish Amore
and Popples beckon with open arms like family mem-
bers one shrinks from at a reunion (pl. 55; nos. 17, 20,
p. 117). Its creepy and unbecoming to want to be liked
so much, but Koons urges his viewers to get over their
ingrained decorum and acquired shame. He was even
willing to debase himself in this emancipatory narrative,
appearing as a boy prodding a pig attended by angels
in the eponymous carving Ushering in Banality (pl. 53).
The masterpiece of the series is surely the gilded
porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles, which por-
trays the King of Pop and his pet chimpanzee garbed in
matching band uniforms and surrounded by an offering
of delicate blossoms (pl. 63). Based on an iconic public-
ity photograph, the sculpture serves as the conceptual
lynchpin of Banality, interlacing its themes and linking
them directly to the contemporary world. In person, the
work never ceases to startle. Drawing on the tradition of
heroic portrait statuary and betting the renown of his
subject, Koons rendered the pair at larger-than-life-size.
Yet the scale is discomting for the depiction of such pas-
sive recumbency, and so is Jacksons rouged alabaster
skin. If many of the series other sculptures rely on stock
characters or treat in generic terms bromides such as
human affection for cuddly creatures, here Banalitys
motifs are lent vivid, disturbing credenceright down
to the artists identication with his subject. If I could
be one other living person, Koons remarked at the
time, it would probably be Michael Jackson.
33
With
his own fame ascendant, the artist repeatedly marveled
at the superstars ability to communicate with such a
broad public and, one imagines, at his ability to pio-
neer artistic innovation within a pop genre. Koons even
praised Jacksons willingness to remake himself surgi-
cally to become more palatable to a white middle-class
audience. Thats radicality. Thats abstraction, Koons
declared. Im much more interested in that kind of
abstraction than in any formalist idea.
34
But by 1988, Jackson was on the cusp of ghoulish-
ness and desperation. His greatest albums were behind
him; his medical skin lightening had begun; and his
emotional bond to his animal companion betrayed his
inability to form an intimate human one (a cathexis eerily
redoubled in Koonss sculpture by Bubbless grip on his
blanket). Koons captured all this with a synthetic bril-
liance, casting the duo as a piet for an age when pop
stars inspire truly religious fervor. Of course, it was the
singer, not the chimp, whose passion Koons pregured.
In contrast to the source image, he turned Jacksons
head to avert our gaze, lending him a beatic humility
and childlike innocence. Over time, the singers features
grew even closer to those of the sculpture, and his pre-
mature death in 2009 took on a dimension of Christian
sacrice. The work is a marvel of prolepsis. Rarely in art
history do a subject, a form, a material, and a moment
so potently entwine.
Once unveiled in New York, Banality caused a sensa-
tion the likes of which the art world had not experienced
in decades. Reliable curmudgeon Hilton Kramer opined
that the show really does carry things to a new low,
22
Publicity image of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, c. 1985
No Limits
while Arthur C. Danto marveled that it raised a question
that I thought long dead: Is it (is IT) art? Veteran critic
Sidney Tillim described the hysterical critical reaction
as unlike anything I can remember since the advent
of Pop Art in 1961 62. And Adam Gopnik concurred,
observing that Banality shocked people who claimed
not to have been shocked by anything at all since the
early sixties, and caused a scandal of a sort that was . . .
almost touching in its re-creation of an earlier and more
embattled era in the history of modern art.
35
It is, in
retrospect, touching and even hard to fathom that fewer
than three decades ago an entire art community could
be outraged by a ceramic doll holding a pot of jam, but
this response, as we will see, was fueled by factors such
as Koonss rising prices and celebrity. It is also inspiring.
What is remarkable about these sculptures almost
thirty years later is that they remain nearly as prob-
lematic dare I say vulgar? as when they were rst
made. I mean this as high praise. The aesthetic affront
of early Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, by comparison,
has congealed into elegance, as has the Minimalism of
Carl Andre and Donald Judd, which once challenged
taste and now represents the height of tastefulness.
The same could not be said of Koonss Banality sculp-
tures or of many of those that followed. I have seen
his beaming Winter Bears and frowning Popples in tony
residences, and each encounter comes as a shock. They
look aggressive and out of place, bigger and more gar-
ish than they should, their scabrous surfaces vaguely
repellent. They never seem quite at home in the homes
of their owners, nor in the museums their owners sup-
port. Koonss art rarely feels chic the way that even the
toughest objects by Sherrie Levine or Christopher Wool
can. It seldom matches the sofa. Stylishness or the lack
thereof is neither an absolute positive value nor a nega-
tive one; it changes with the times and without direct
correlation to art-historical signicance. But Koonss
work remains impressively resistant to that trait. It tests
our jaded open-mindedness. Unlike most once-trans-
gressive art, it has retained over decades a concussive
power, a capacity to perturb and revolt. Looking at it in
the present, one still senses its original sin.
SUPERNOVA
Banality made Koons the superstar we know him to be
today. By now we take his fascinating and problematic
status as such for granted, just as we are more generally
inured to contemporary artists place in the endlessly
expanding media universe. They gure alongside actors,
athletes, rappers, socialites, politicians, and reality-TV
stars in gossip items, on Twitter feeds, and in fashion
ads, while their art, lives, and prices are chronicled with
the same ardor and snark once reserved for more run-
of-the-mill celebrities. If Jackson Pollocks appearance
in Life (or his paintings appearance as backdrops in
Vogue) once caused surprise and consternation, today
such images would scarcely raise an eyebrow or sell a
magazine.
36
Precedents in the modern era for this celeb-
rity treatment run back at least to Gustave Courbets star
turn in Parisian pamphlets, and in the last century the
rst true art stars were arguably Dal and Warhol.
37
With
unprecedented marketing savvy, they forged new modes
of self-presentation that made them, as much as their art,
fodder for media consumption. Yet it was not until the
mid-1980s that less eccentric gures joined in, as artists
came to be treated more like personalities than visitors
from some rareed foreign realm. The explosion of the
1980s art market and the downtown New York club scene
launched not just a roster of art stars but also an era of
media fascination with them that continues today. And no
artist has come to exemplify that condition more acutely
than Koons, whose Google news alerts arrive daily with
word of his exhibitions, prices, corporate collaborations,
and appearances alongside the likes of Hillary Clinton,
Lady Gaga, and Muhammad Ali.
38
Although Koonss critical buzz had grown during
the early 1980s, he didnt gain real media traction until
1986, when he and fellow artists Ashley Bickerton, Peter
Halley, and Vaisman made the much-ballyhooed leap
from International With Monument to the prominent
SoHo perch of Sonnabend, earning them the epithet
The Hot Four on the cover of New York magazine.
39

Two years later Koons separated himself from the pack
with the sensation of Banality. The series tripartite inter-
national debut was more akin to a movie release than
to the unveiling of a serious artists work, but it can be
taken as a shrewd commentary on the new place of art-
ists in the celebrity and market rmament, long before
Damien Hirst pushed that point with his concurrent 2012
shows of spot paintings at Gagosian Gallerys eleven
global outposts.
Appropriately enough, Koons announced his new
body of work with a group of glamorous art-magazine
ads in which he fashioned himself a pop star with the
help of commercial photographer Greg Gorman (nos.
4, 6, p. 114; no. 14, p. 116; no. 19, p. 117). Although
the ads ostensibly trumpeted a trio of exhibitions, they in
fact promoted the artist himself as a new kind of celeb-
rity, seen lecturing to adoring children or surrounded
by bikini-clad babes a mode of self-presentation that
perfectly emblematized the social status that artists had
only lately attained. These images can be seen as a kind
23
Scott Rothkopf
of performance art in their own right, drawing on a long
line of advertisements in which artists exaggerated and
spoofed their sex appeal, whether Ed Ruscha lolling in
bed with two women, Lynda Benglis leaning condently
against a Porsche, or Robert Morris posing as a mus-
cleman.
40
Sporting a bathrobe and surrounded by circus
animals, Koons too gave his ads a parodic edge, since he
resembles a clown as much as a matinee idol, a perfect
spokesman for the series conjoined themes of innocence
and debasement. But Koonss images differ from their
DIY precedents in that he marshaled Hollywoods mar-
keting machinery to present himself as the kind of icon
that he unlike his predecessors would actually soon
become. In daring to work with the very mythmakers an
advanced artist is presumed to oppose, he snared the
publicity apparatus directly within his frame, challenging
the myths that apparatus generates as well as an artists
equally mythic innocence of them.
Koons, however, was not content to play a star in
the art rags when he could play or better yet, be one
in real life. As if a form of self-fullling prophecy, his
paid announcements were closely followed by appear-
ances on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and
inside People, as he grew increasingly preoccupied with
reaching an even greater audience.
41
How effective are
art stars? Koons asked interviewer Matthew Collings in
1989, before answering his own question. Their glam-
our is pretty limited. . . . The only way artists can nd
their own glamour is to incorporate aspects of systems
other than art and to be creative and condent enough
to really exploit what they have.
42
A few months later,
Koons struck on a way both to demonstrate that con-
dence and to engage a system far beyond the art
world: a project entitled Made in Heaven, costarring the
world-famous Hungarian-born porn star and Italian par-
liamentarian Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina.
Koons had initially spied Staller in 1988 in Stern
magazine and had used her mesh-covered torso as a
source for his Banality sculpture Fait dhiver (pl. 61). He
encountered her image again the following year on
the cover of a mens magazine, and he recalls being
enthralled by her beauty and innocence, his sense that
her total public acceptance of her sexuality made her
the eternal virgin.
43
Invited by the Whitney Museum
to create an outdoor billboard for Image World, a 1989
exhibition exploring the relationship between art and
the media, Koons arranged to be photographed with
Staller for an advertisement announcing a feature lm he
planned to make with her titled Made in Heaven. Koons
traveled to Italy and contracted the starlet to pose on her
own sets and be shot by her manager and frequent pho-
tographer, Riccardo Schicchi. Set against a tempestuous
backdrop atop a glistening boulder, a naked Koons
clutches his costars lingerie-clad body while staring at
the camera and, he seems to imagine, his legions of
adoring fans. Seen from the streets of Manhattan, the
billboard represented a particularly brazen form of self-
promotion. Neither a spokesperson nor a hired hand, as
Warhol and Dal ordinarily were in the realm of advertis-
ing, Koons cast himself as a bona de star with an even
more famous heroine, claiming his proper place in the
network of publicity and mass attention that many artists
had long coveted while pretending to scorn.
With this indelible image, Koons launched a media
blitz and a body of work that grew increasingly entwined
and, ultimately, indistinguishable. Captivated by his
muse and the implicit promise of his new project (to say
nothing of his own burgeoning celebrity), Koons returned
with Staller to the studio to make more photographs, the
rst three of which were photomechanically painted on
large canvases and unveiled in the summer of 1990 at
the Venice Biennale (no. 2, p. 132). He spoke of this work
in evangelical tones as a kind of extension of the Banality
series. If those sculptures were intended to help viewers
overcome the embarrassment of their bourgeois taste,
then these images of a contemporary Adam and Eve
would remove the shame of nakedness and sex, lead-
ing to total self-acceptance.
44
The Venice vernissage also
served as the public debut for the personal relationship
24
Helmut Newton, Jeff Koons & Cicciolina, Italy, 1991. Gelatin
silver print, 23
5
8 x 19
5
8 in. (60 x 50 cm). Edition of 3
No Limits
that had developed between Koons and Staller, who
arrived daily at the installation in Vegas-worthy getups
to tongue kiss before legions of paparazzi in front of their
graven images (exhibiting an exposed vulva and accid
penis). Had Koons merely taken up with an infamous
porn star, he no doubt would have caused a stir; and had
he merely posed naked with a model, he would have
likely caused an even greater stir. But the fact that this
naked model was both a porn star and his lover blurred
the lines between art, life, and the media to such an
extent that the then ubiquitous theorizing on the relation-
ships among them seemed suddenly beside the point.
45
As summer turned to fall, more than two hundred
media outlets announced Koons and Stallers engage-
ment from Helsinki to Akron. That the local paper in
Sedalia, Missouri, deemed the story of interest to the
towns 19,800 denizens provides some measure of the
depth of Koonss media penetration, as does the fact
that the news often appeared alongside other Associated
Press items featuring veritable stars like Madonna and
Pavarotti. In January 1991 word leaked that the mar-
riage was off, but by May it was on again, with a United
Press International item picked up by the Fresno Bee
claiming that Hungarian minister Zoltan Szirmai had
agreed to perform Stallers union with American sculp-
tor Jess Coon. Ofcial pictures of the June 1 nuptials in
Budapest reached millions of readers via a staggering
six hundred print sources worldwide.
46
Although Koons
could not (yet) have boasted a name as recognizable as
Warhols, no artist had ever gained such a wide media
presence by virtue of his or her personal affairs, just like
a real celebrity could.
Koons went the next step that fall with exhibitions
at Sonnabend and Hetzler that served as a multilayered
Edenic allegory of sex and love (no. 4, p. 132; no. 8,
p. 133). Panting wooden dogs were displayed alongside
Murano glass gurines of the newlyweds in agrante and
sculptures of carved owers with humanoid orices, some
in the midst of pollination by a hummingbirds long bill
(pls. 72, 75, 76, 80). What had been only implied in the
relatively chaste Venice pictures was made explicit in a
new group of canvases that featured the couple engaged
in acts of oral, vaginal, and anal penetration (pls. 78,
79). In scenes that ranged from sensual to rough, Koons
revealed a body transformed by his much-touted gym
regime and a face covered with eye shadow and pancake
makeup. The New York show caused a scandal besting
that of Banality, with lines around the block and critics
decrying the work as misogynist megalomania at the
height of the AIDS crisis and culture wars, as well as at
the depth of a post-crash art market whose peak Koons
had epitomized.
47
In retrospect, however, it is hard to
take these scenes as simply another afrmation of het-
erosexist male domination. After all, they portray a mar-
ried couple, surrounded by gossamer butteries peculiar
to the wifes corporate enterprise, with a husband risk-
ing everything in full-on maquillage. What makes these
queer pictures still so riveting is their scrambling of nor-
mal social codes and their status not as porn but as self-
portraiture all in the name of a self-acceptance that no
normal viewer could ever truly share. Even for Koons, the
fever dream proved unsustainable, and within two years
his relationship with Staller ended, at great human cost
to both of the participants and to their child, Ludwig, who
became the object of an acrimonious custody dispute and
was eventually abducted by his mother.
48
Even today, a
genuine sense of risk that worrying ipside of free-
dom remains part of the emotional atmosphere that
Made in Heaven conjures. If it had all been a game, one
imagines that Koons would have been more emotionally
well armored.
Just before the Sonnabend exhibition opened, art
historian Rosalind Krauss complained to the New York
Times: Artists interest in using the media against itself
was formerly subversive and parodic, beginning with
Dadaism. . . . Koons, on the other hand, is not exploit-
ing the media for avant-garde purposes. Hes in cahoots
with the media. . . . Its self-advertisement, and I nd that
repulsive.
49
Krausss revulsion is understandable, but
her critical model failed to consider how drastically arts
relationship to the media had changed since the time
of Dada, when artists had little risk (or hope) of being
sucked up into the circuitry they mocked. To pretend that
art and artists today are not bound up in this system is at
best a false comfort and at worst a form of denial. Toying
with the new world order, Koons exaggerated and upset
the stability of the artist as a media gure and the gure
of the media in an artists work. He did shine a critical
light on the PR machine, and that light in part emanated
from his own incendiary stardom, which has only con-
tinued to grow in concert with the number of outlets for
it. We could say that Koons was arts plant a visitor
from one realm to another who shockingly managed
to take the promise (or threat) of artistic celebrity to its
most extreme conclusion, while never letting us forget
that he was foremost an artist, because the whole mad
process was mirrored in his work. The media spectacle
alone would have been only so interesting, and the work
alone would have had more limited power. But it was
the perfect, truly fearful symmetry he concocted between
them that ensures Made in Heavens enduring relevance
and vexing charge.
25
Scott Rothkopf
VALUE SYSTEMS
The other fearful symmetry that Koonss work lays bare
is that of art and money. Its nearly impossible to have
a conversation or read an article about the artist that
doesnt somehow touch on the topic. What may be sur-
prising is that this was pretty much the case from day
one. In Koonss very rst review, published in Artforum
in 1981, critic Richard Flood deemed the work a com-
mentary on the glamour of conspicuous consumption,
and it would not be long until the press grew equally
xated on the way Koonss art was itself so avidly con-
sumed.
50
The mid-1980s witnessed an unprecedented
surge in the market for contemporary art, and Koons
became its poster boy, as writers seemed almost dumb-
founded that any artists work could attract so much
notice and such high prices in so little time. Countless
articles described in detail the uptick in his prices, which
for Equilibrium began at less than $3,000, then doubled
in a matter of months over 1985, so that by 1988 his
galleries could plausibly ask $250,000 for each of the
three editions of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a rise
that exceeded even that of the decades bullish nancial
markets. These statistics were often accompanied by the
names of the dealers, advisers, and buyers responsible
for the fever pitch, right down to the very month that
mega-collector Charles Saatchi entered Koonss market
(December 1985).
51
In retrospect, the coverage betrays
an air of disbelief and a desire to master it that feels
almost poignant. A brave new era was dawning, and it
compelled a public vivisection that would be unheard
of even today for a thirty-year-old artist. By the time
Schjeldahl declared Koons the artist of the present Age
of Money in 1989, such a statement seemed less opin-
ion than fact.
52
And although that critic was referring to
the apogee of the Reagan-Thatcher era, the Age and
the artist are still so much with us that Koonss example
again proves worth pondering.
All of this would be far less interesting if nancial
values and systems werent themselves a self-conscious
aspect of Koonss art. Any monochrome painting can
be subject to an accelerating price index without visibly
registering that fact. From the start, however, Koonss art
demonstrated a sly and reexive relationship to the com-
modities it cannibalized and aped. The early Inatables,
as we have seen, inaugurated his persistent preoccupa-
tion with the logic of display, a vital link between the
presentation of artworks and commodities. Subsequent
bodies of work pushed this interest further. The uores-
cent light xtures of Pre-New lend banal store-bought
products an otherworldly nimbus, while the lambent
acrylic cases of The New further conate the types of
lighted display systems designed to showcase art and
consumer goods. This reciprocity was made abundantly
clear when Koons debuted a selection of these works in
1980 in the window of the New Museum on Fourteenth
Street, where confused passersby reportedly inquired
whether the vacuums were for sale (no. 1, p. 58).
53

These series stressed the market economys cult of shiny
newness, the next model put before buyers, the multi-
plicity of options that capitalism offers us to achieve the
same ends a cycle that the contemporary art system
perpetuates in its unceasing stress on aesthetic inno-
vation. Unlike Duchamps generic shovels and urinals,
Koonss chosen products are conspicuously linked to spe-
cic brands. Their makers logos and names Hoover
or Shelton are emphasized on each appliance and in
the title of each artwork, which could now also be called
a Jeff Koons, the product having been borne from one
market to another by virtue of a new makers mark.
54
In his subsequent bodies of work, Luxury and
Degradation and Statuary, Koons added yet another
Mbius-like twist by taking commercial products
already in the guise of collectible sculptures, such as
Doctors Delight and the J. B. Turner Train, and magically
transforming them into yet ner art by casting them
in stainless steel. Koons spoke of the former series in
particular as a parable of class attainment, expounding
on the relationship of each of the sculptures and liquor
ads to particular market segments (Baccarat crystal and
Frangelico aimed at the rich; a pail and Bacardi for the
poor).
55
He linked the intoxication of the liquor that lit-
erally ran through the show to the dangers of over-
consumption and manipulation by corporate concerns.
Yet as his prices gained steam, critics observed that his
sculptures seemed to reect their newfound status as
market fetishes, grouping his work along with that of
Bickerton, Steinbach, and Allan McCollum, among oth-
ers, under the sobriquets of commodity fetishism and
commodity critique. The jury was out as to whether
Koonss works cynically exploited this situation or criti-
cally commented on it, but in neither case could his
sculptures be faulted for navet about their role in the
system or, more generally, arts newfound one.
56
If any proof were needed that markets and market-
ing were already a self-conscious part of Koonss early
work, one only has to point to the fact that advertis-
ing plays a decisive role in ve of his rst eight series,
whether in the reprinted advertisements of The New and
Luxury and Degradation, the appropriated Nike posters
of Equilibrium, the magazine ads of Banality, or the bill-
board announcing Made in Heaven. In each case, Koons
toyed with the idea of turning an ad into an artwork
and an artwork into an ad. The deadpan, appropriative
26
No Limits
nature of the examples from the rst three of these series
made it hard for critics to argue that Koons was decon-
structing capitalisms visual codes, as was claimed for
the repurposed and abstracted advertisements of Dara
Birnbaum and Richard Prince, among others. Yet some-
thing about the way Koonss chosen images function in
the space of the gallery gives them a blunt, almost nefari-
ous edge. Ripped wholesale from the commercial welter
of the world, they are beautiful yet bleak, seductive yet
brutal, more nakedly exposed than similar imagery made
abstract or arty in putatively more critical hands. The rela-
tionship of his art to corporate structures was made taut
and complex by the direct way he engaged them. To pro-
cure mint copies of his chosen posters, Koons ew to the
Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters of Nike; to make his
liquor-ad paintings, he used the printing plates from the
original advertisements. In a dizzying conceptual feint, he
had his stainless-steel casts of Jim Beam collectibles lled
with bourbon at the companys Kentucky distillery and
sealed with actual paper tax stamps, imbricating them
directly within the corporate, governmental, and market
systems they simultaneously celebrated and skewered.
Koonss biography reveals that he was always inter-
ested in the ne art of selling and the selling of ne art.
His interviews are peppered with mentions of the joy he
found as a child hawking wrapping paper door to door,
an activity that made him feel he was meeting peoples
needs, and of his pride in selling his rst canvases at the
tender age of eight in his fathers store.
57
In his frontline
post at the Museum of Modern Art, he famously sold
memberships at an unprecedented clip thanks to an
affable demeanor and outrageous dress (think sequined
vests and novelty ties) indebted to the amboyant sales-
manship of his hero Dal. His air for sales attracted
more lucrative offers, and when he left MoMA in 1980
it was for jobs on Wall Street selling mutual funds and,
later, trading commodities. This fact was often cited
in articles in the mid-1980s that focused on Koonss then-
escalating prices, as though his employment history
might offer proof that he had been a cunning market
manipulator all along.
58
Yet nothing could have been further from the truth.
Koons repeatedly contended that his nearly ve-year
stint on Wall Street was always aimed at raising the capi-
tal necessary to produce his increasingly expensive art,
which initially found few backers or sold at such losses
(sometimes less than a quarter of the production cost)
that he had to retreat to his parents house in Sarasota,
Florida, in 1982 to get back on his feet.
59
Little more
than a decade later, he faced nancial ruin again when
his Celebration works proved far costlier to fabricate to
his exacting standards than he had sold the unmade
sculptures for, and even the support of a trio of well-
heeled dealers and better-heeled collectors couldnt save
him from having to lay off nearly his entire staff when
in 1997 money ran out and his production screeched
to a halt.
60
I cite these boom-and-bust tales not out of
salacious interest or to vouch for Koonss honor but to
make a point often lost in the frothy coverage of Koonss
market: His business model has always been risky at best
and disastrous at worst. If he happens ultimately to have
done well for himself, its not because that was ever truly
his goal or because his production methods portended
it. As Koons himself has put it, It would be much more
economically viable for me to produce something ef-
cient, low-budget, and to get it out.
61
In this sense, he
is a bad business artist, to borrow Warhols infamous
term, in part because he is uninterested in or constitu-
tionally incapable of producing so much product. His
dealer Ileana Sonnabend put it succinctly in 1991: Jeff
doesnt understand money at all.
62
By contrast, Prince,
Hirst, and Takashi Murakami, market stars with whom
Koons is often lumped, are far more pragmatic models
and far better heirs of Warhols legacy in this regard. The
27
Koons in 1977 during his time as an employee at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in front of James
Rosenquists Marilyn, 1962
Scott Rothkopf
reason Koons minted ve Balloon Dog sculptures was
not to increase his take but to make the meticulously
engineered object nancially viable, since the break-
even point on fewer examples would have been impos-
sibly high. There couldnt have been one without the
whole litter.
All along, Koonss expert salesmanship has served
as the grease that keeps the wheels of his system turning.
I remember a studio visit when one of his dealers told
me he felt guilty for having distracted the artist from his
work by bringing a favored client for a dazzling tour, but
later I realized that what we had witnessed was Koonss
work: not performance art exactly, but the perfect pitch
for selling multimillion-dollar sculptures on the basis of
foamcore maquettes to patrons, who must often wait
longer to claim the nished piece than they would the
fruits of a speculative real-estate venture. If Koons seems
unnaturally interested in his auction prices, more accom-
modating of requests from Christies or Sothebys to shill
for a sale of which he will receive no cut, this is in part
because his very ability to produce new work depends
on his prices remaining lofty enough to induce people
to pay so dearly for it. (The Celebration sculptures, for
example, only began owing again by virtue of a broader
rise in Koonss market, which began around 1999, when
Pink Panther sold at auction for a record $1.8 million.)
63

Its easy as an artist or critic to be contemptuous of such
nagling, especially if ones working method appears to
allow one independence from some of the art worlds
least wholesome structures. After all, any half-decent
talent with a bolt of canvas and a tube of paint is better
poised to realize far greater prot margins. Yet if those
same artists look out of place nervous, guilty, con-
icted at an art fair, at a museum gala, or smiling from
within a magazine spread, Koons seems at ease not just
by dint of his cheery disposition but because such appear-
ances are indispensable to the creation of his art, and
therefore central to his practice. A strangely pragmatic
absolution attends the untold and unconicted hand-
shakes and smiles on trips from Los Angeles to Qatar
to sell clients with a taste for the unique what are often
essentially high-priced multiples distinguished by color.
Koons doesnt dream of making money; he dreams
of making artworks. The money is a means to an end,
and his ability to marshal so much of it has allowed him to
produce some of the most extraordinarily crafted works
of art since patronage was wrested from the hands of
princes and popes. True, this might be possible only in
an era of increasing inequality, but it remains an open
question as to whether the future will judge such objects
more harshly for their economic underpinnings than
today one assesses, say, the dome of Saint Peters, which,
like Koonss work, was paid for by the one percent but
broadly enjoyed by the remaining ninety-nine. Money is
so conspicuously central to Koonss process and such an
exaggerated aspect of his hyperproduced objects that it
inevitably becomes one of their subjectseven when,
after 1990, this became less a function of their specic
motifs (a crucial point of distinction from the mislead-
ing, if frequently invoked, comparisons to, say, Princes
check paintings, Hirsts diamond-encrusted skull, or
Murakamis endlessly branded wares).
64
This outward
mien causes discomfort in those who might prefer that
the nancial value of an artwork be divorced from, or at
least concealed behind, its aesthetic ones, as in the case
of similarly expensive paintings by a Brice Marden or a
Johns. It has led many critics, in fact, to sniff that Koonss
work plays to the unsophisticated tastes of the nouveau
riche or is somehow specically attuned to the hanker-
ings of a new oligarchy, just as Frank Jewett Mather
once claimed that William-Adolphe Bouguereaus vapid
nudes were aimed at crass American stockbrokers (a
point the artist himself conceded, and that Koons later
echoed when declaring his art a support system for his
bourgeois patrons).
65
Mathers reasoning may have
had some merit when stockbrokers preferred academic
schlock to paintings by Edgar Degas, but it doesnt really
28
Louise Lawler, Egg and Gun, at Large, 2008. Chromogenic
print mounted to acrylic on museum box, 28
9
16 x 22
15
16 in.
(72.5 x 58.3 cm). Edition of 5
No Limits
hold up when our own newly rich have no greater appe-
tite for a Koons than they do for a Johns or a Marden, a
Cindy Sherman or a Wade Guyton. The difference is that
Koonss objects own up to their value and in part can exist
only because of it. They act as uncanny barometers of
the unseen pressures that surround them wherever they
happen to be. It is certainly no coincidence that Louise
Lawler that great poet of arts lived circumstance has
made Koonss sculptures a favored subject (no. 16, p. 98;
no. 15, p. 117).
Take, for example, Balloon Dog. Its not for noth-
ing that Koons has called the sculpture a Trojan Horse.
66

Its cold, shiny surfaces seem to condense the hothouse
ows of capital and desire that both bring it into being
and buoy its movement around the globe. We can almost
imagine it sweating like a crystal tumbler on a billion-
aires yacht (and Koons has designed one of those, too).
Balloon Dog works its hardest and looks its best in places
like the crisp lobby of the Seagram Building or the ornate
Salon dHercule at the Chteau de Versailles, or stand-
ing proudly outside Christies Rockefeller Center edice,
venues where most modern sculptures would appear
as compromised as priests at a brothel. Balloon Dog
understands and even shares the logics of these sites,
all conceived under disparate formal programs and the
unifying sign of money. It seizes and distorts them within
its seductive reective curves. Like so many of Koonss
sculptures, Balloon Dog is, paradoxically, at once solici-
tous and tough. The latter quality should not be underes-
timated at a time when so much art seems to buckle with
embarrassment under a pecuniary attention it neither
seeks nor sustains. Koonss example is not that of an artist
playing to or just rifng on a market, but of one who in
supple ways uses that market to create something that
could never have been made before and could now be
made only by him. We might wish Koons to overturn the
table rather than take his place at it, but in choosing the
latter he serves as a beacon of an artists empowerment
when many feel like pawns in a game theyd prefer not
to play. His is a singular case for a singular time, and the
cause of art is somehow richer for it.
NE PLUS ULTRA
For an artist who has persistently claimed to have little
interest in craft per se, Koons has arguably pursued it
more ruthlessly than any of our age.
67
One could argue
further that he is unmatched in the range of techniques
and mediums (if not precisely materials) encompassed
by his art. Even a partial accounting is dizzying: a multi-
tude of approaches to casting steel, bronze, aluminum,
glass, porcelain, plastic, and plaster; carved wood and
marble; rotationally molded polyethylene; carpentry;
milled granite, bronze, marble, and steel; photome-
chanical printing; gilding, glazing, and mirror-polish-
ing; and a constantly evolving variety of approaches to
oil painting by hand. This leaves aside strategies such
as exhibiting appropriated objects, fabricating acrylic
vitrines and tanks with anti-vibration feet, or, for that
matter, practicing horticulture at small scale (the potted
petunias of Pluto and Proserpina [pl. 128]) and large (the
towering topiaries). And it ignores all the behind-the-
scenes processes that precede the aforementioned, such
as light and CT scanning; 3-D printing; plaster model-
ing; photography; and good-old-fashioned drawing and
collage, as well as their digital variants. The tally of peo-
ple employed in this work over the past thirty-ve years
would number into the thousands, including Koonss
assistants (now counting more than 120), various indus-
trial manufacturers, high-tech consultants, the makers
of Spalding basketballs (who supply custom replacement
parts for deteriorated models), and the Nobel-laureate
physicist whom Koons consulted to levitate those balls in
their tanks, as well as the wood carvers of Bavaria and
glassblowers of Pennsylvania, among other ateliers ply-
ing centuries-old techniques.
29
Installation view, Jeff Koons Versailles, Chteau de Versailles,
France, 20089. Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994 2000
Scott Rothkopf
The list is long but not gratuitous. Unlike most artists
who develop a body of work from a well-honed rela-
tionship to a particular technique, Koons usually starts
from scratch. In rare instances he may be inspired by the
potential of a specic medium or technology, but more
often than not his approach arises as a way to realize
an image in his head. And that image is never limited
to what he or anyone else knows how to make. In
this sense, he is correct in arguing that his methods are
merely means to various ends, though that phrasing fails
to account for just how difcult those means are to mas-
ter and sometimes to invent, as well as how crucial they
are to the conceptual underpinnings of his project. I use
means here quite broadly. By procuring the original
printing plates for his liquor ads, for example, or lling
and sealing his steel vehicles at the Jim Beam distillery,
he directly harnessed within his work the same systems
he intended to critique. These extreme measures were
as much a part of his process as was casting, and in both
cases a much easier solution could have been found to
achieve visually similar ends. When Koons set his sights
on gift-shop bibelots, he traveled to remote European
villages to contract their far-ung makers, just as he hired
Cicciolinas or David Bowies photographers when he
meant to fashion himself, respectively, as a lover or a star.
Nothing else would do.
Even when Koons is outsourcing his production, he
maintains as tight a grip on the process as if he were
making something with his own hands. Exhaustive faxes
sent from hotels in Cologne and Milan to the artisans
of Banality ring with the urgency of an epistolary novel
set on a military front. Regarding a detail no more than
an inch long on the ve-foot-wide String of Puppies
(pl. 64), the artist scrawled: I MUST BE SURE FLOWER
ON TOP OF MANS HEAD HAS BEEN GIVEN THE STEM
I REQUESTED. THE COLOR OF STRING OF PUPPIES
IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. To his dealers back on
the home front in New York, he inveighed: I MUST
PROTECT MY WORK!
68
Yet these fabrication challenges
were modest compared to those of the past two decades,
which required the pioneering of new technologies. This
difculty came to the fore with the Celebration series
(pls. 8192), which was conceived in 1994 and remains
unnished. For Koons, the subjects of the series were
meant to evoke the cycle of a year or even a life. They
invoke birth, love, religious observances, and procre-
ation, whether in the form of a cracked egg, an engage-
ment ring, the paraphernalia of a birthday party, or the
sexually suggestive curves and protuberances lurking
within a balloon animal or ower.
69
He envisioned a
body of work involving large-scale metal and plastic
sculptures and multiple oils on canvas, some of which
were impossible to achieve exactly as he imagined them.
Koons had to push specialized fabricators to mold his
maquettes and cast, assemble, polish, and paint sculp-
tures as they never had before. Even after years of work
in sites across the country and around the globe, some
of the objects had to be scrapped and completely recon-
ceived or begun again.
I remember witnessing this rsthand over a number
of visits in 2004 to Koonss studio, where he and his
assistants were toiling away on the painting Play-Doh.
Like all of Koonss canvases, the work depended on the
fastidious replication of a source image, in this case a
photograph of a mound of the titular substance that
had been broken into thousands of crisp contours, then
painstakingly transferred to canvas and colored in one by
one. No painting had ever been made before in quite this
way. When I rst saw Play-Doh it was ostensibly nished,
having been published and exhibited on multiple occa-
sions. Yet when I encountered it again during a later visit
to Koonss studio, a pair of assistants were daubing it with
paint. The colors werent quite right, Koons explained,
and on a subsequent visit I was astonished or rather
horried to nd that after countless man-hours the
canvas had been cut into pieces and commenced afresh,
this time using slightly updated techniques that might
more precisely achieve Koonss desired palette. Once
30
Play-Doh, 1995 2008. Oil on canvas, 131
1
4 x 111
1
4 in.
(333.4 x 282.6 cm). Collection of the artist
No Limits
the second version was nished, I would have been hard-
pressed to distinguish it from the rst without studying
both side by side, and the same could certainly have been
said for any likely buyer.
70
Settling, for Koons, is never an option. Corners can-
not be cut. Though his standards continue to escalate,
this dedication to perfection has been present from the
very beginning of his career. Koonss fanatical devotion
to his readymade models and the integrity of his objects
led him to cast pieces like Fisherman Golfer, Jim Beam
Model A Ford Pick-up Truck, and Two Kids with moving
parts (pls. 34, 43, 50), even if they were never really
intended to be interactive and their changeability is not
evident to the naked eye. He has often spoken of spend-
ing time and money nishing the undersides of his sculp-
tures, just in case their nether regions were ever exposed
and might risk letting the viewer down.
71
For Koons, this is
a matter of earning his audiences trust, which he prizes
over all else: trust in the work, trust in its maker, and
trust in the very idea and power of art. After all, over the
preceding century, this trust had eroded for many observ-
ers of modern art thanks to its purposeful abnegation of
craft. Skill was supplanted by deskilling as a means to
challenge traditional aesthetic values and reorient our
attention from manual nesse to conceptual novelty.
According to this line of reasoning, a commitment to craft
in general, or to a quality like verisimilitude in particular,
by Koons or anyone else, might be impugned as retarda-
taire. But, in fact, his sedulous craftsmanship and increas-
ing technological innovation have broken new ground for
art and enmeshed it more forcefully within the visual logic
of the contemporary world whether through collage
paintings that depend on computer software for their
compositional and mimetic prowess (pl. 113) or objects
rendered with a precision that could be accomplished
only by the most advanced machinery of our time. Koons
is not the rst artist to appropriate methods from science
and industry, but his reach has gone further than any
of his predecessors, and, as Michelle Kuo argues in this
volume, it extends even beyond the known boundaries
of the elds he mines for expertise.
72
Yet for all Koonss
obsession with production, his work somehow manages
to avoid feeling overproduced. Despite their expense,
his objects demonstrate a stringent economy. Everything
and nothing about them is excessive. They exude a
sense of deliberateness and even concision in keeping
with Koonss emphasis on ends over means. One could
appreciate one of his paintings or sculptures more or
less, but rarely could one point to a particular passage or
technique within a given work and claim it unnecessary
or out of sync with any other. Even if his works encourage
slow delectation, one ultimately consumes them whole.
Why bother, one might ask, to spend two decades
and millions of dollars assiduously engineering a ten-
foot-tall aluminum mound of Play-Doh (pl. 89)? Why
bother, one could answer, to spend ve years on ones
back decorating the Sistine ceiling? Or a lifetime paint-
ing dates like On Kawara or the Vivian Girls like Henry
Darger? The reasons are not the same, of course, but
in each case we are compelled by the artists profound
commitment to his work. This quality is one of the pri-
mary feelings aroused by Koonss art at its best. It evinces
an insanity bound by reason. The asymmetry between
his quotidian subjects and meticulous methodology is
in large measure what makes his works so stupefying to
contemplate, if riveting to behold. We are gripped by the
exactness of their minute details but also by the absurdity
of anyone laboring so long and hard to realize an image
as ostensibly dumb as a kitten in a sock or an inat-
able Hulk supporting a boulder. Their shrewd precision
invokes in us the consuming wonder of a child before a
toy, and also, at times, a sense of awe and even terror.
Koonss sculptures and paintings embody the maniacal
dream of the perfect object one whose perfection must
be palpable according to its own internal logic, whether
through its immaculate surface, accurate coloration, or
impossible scale. This perfection is central to the sense of
love, trust, and support he says he hopes his works will
convey, an aim that sometimes evokes a peculiar pathos,
as in the case of the Celebration series, which became an
ode to Koonss abducted son. Its objects are endowed, to
borrow a phrase from Mike Kelley, with more love hours
than can ever be repaid,
73
as well as with a determina-
tion, intensity, and invention that amplify and transcend
their iconography. Koons would rather destroy a sculp-
ture or cut up a canvas than have it leave his clutches
in a state that does not meet his standards and these
standards, though sometimes difcult precisely to per-
ceive, are always deeply felt.
THEN AND NOW
I often ask artists two or three decades younger than
Koons what they think about him and his work. The
answers vary, of course, but my admittedly unscientic
poll has found considerable consensus on two points.
The rst is that Koons is a real artist. In calling him
real, my respondents are referring to his absolute and
unstinting dedication to his work. One artist memorably
expressed her admiration as follows: Hes gured out
this way to deal with so much bullshit in the world to
make exactly what he wants. Thats just really hard to
do. In her eyes, his example is not one of capitulation
31
Scott Rothkopf
32
or collusion with the system but of holding ones own
in the midst of it. The second point of agreement is that
Koons love him or hate him cannot be easily dis-
missed. His precedent simply looms too large and at so
many turns. Indeed, anytime an artist today contracts a
fabricator for a custom part, as is a common practice,
she is trailing in the wake of Koons, who raised that bar
far higher than Judd could have imagined. Anytime an
artists ascent makes him lucky (or unlucky) enough to
be photographed for a glossy magazine, Koonss prec-
edent hovers like a deity (or devil). Anytime an artists
work sells at auction or, conversely, an artist decides
to explore a distribution system completely outside the
marketplace Koonss astronomical prices serve as an
outer point of reference. Anytime an artist turns to the
readymade, Koonss deadpan appropriations and dop-
pelgngers demark possible extremes. Anytime an artist
commits her all to a project that might take months or
years to complete, Koonss decades-long pursuit of his
works comes to mind. And anytime an artist stares into
the maw of pop culture and consumer products, Koons
casts his long shadow.
These parameters are by no means all-encompass-
ing, but it is Koonss bright delineation of them that has
made him a dening artist of our era. He was already
recognized as such at a startlingly early point in his
career. In 1987 curator Allan Schwartzman declared
the thirty-two-year-old Koons the greatest reection
of our age.
74
The following year Schjeldahl wrote that
he may be the denitive artist of this moment, and in
1989 Sherrie Levine dubbed him the ultimate child of
our time. That same year Eric Gibson handed Koons the
decade, claiming that in his work the essential charac-
ter of the 80s is to be found.
75
Such laurels were not
without their thorns. Calling Koons the reection of an
age is not the same thing as claiming that he holds a
mirror to it. And granting Koons a decade associated
with Reaganomics, yuppies, and the AIDS crisis is a bit
like congratulating Jean-Honor Fragonard for nailing
the 80s in eighteenth-century France. We might take
greater comfort in an avatar along the lines of Willem
de Kooning, whose canvases typify the 1950s while
appearing outwardly innocent of the pox of, say,
McCarthyism or segregation. But we nevertheless tend
to credit artists for crystallizing an eras noxiousness,
especially if they do so with the singular pellucidity that
Koons has. In this he is more like the German Neue
Sachlichkeit painters of the 1920s, who maintained a
potentially reactionary hold on guration while reect-
ing the complex mores of their society, with all the ethical
ambiguity that implied.
The 1980s passed and Koons remained. Despite the
ostracism that befell the artist after Made in Heaven, in
1992 Renato Barilli declared Koons the most represen-
tative artist of the last years of this century, of this dying
millennium, and well into the next one Saltz dubbed
him the emblematic artist of the decade its thump-
ing, thumping heart.
76
That these words were written
in 2009, some two decades after the rst one Koons
was said to epitomize, makes them all the more remark-
able. One could argue, of course, that the artists stay-
ing power is due less to his constancy than to that of the
epoch with which it has coincideda point that could
be made by citing, say, the continuous growth of income
inequality from the 1980s to today. But we could just as
easily adduce more recent milestones and ruptures that
mark our distance from Koonss emergence, whether
the events of 9/11, the election of the rst African
American president, the collapse of the global economy,
advances in gay marriage equality, and the explosion
of the internet. In the context of art alone, tastes have
changed; new forms, mediums, and critical paradigms
Puppy, 1992, installed at Rockefeller Center,
New York, 2000
No Limits
have emerged; markets have twice soared and plum-
meted; global awareness has grown; and biennials and
art fairs have proliferated. My point is not that Koonss
work registers all these shifts, but rather that he was seen
by many observers as the artist of the moment before
they occurred, and for many he remains so even after.
It is exceedingly rare that an artist comes to exemplify
a decade in his or her own time. It is rarer still if not
unprecedented in the modern era that he or she could
be said to exemplify the arc of three.
The reason for this, Id argue, is that Koons is not
just a child of our time but an active agent of it, one who
has forged an extreme aesthetic position in concert with
an admittedly problematic but also promising epoch.
The boundaries he has broken are unique to his histori-
cal position within arts great narrative and draw on the
larger forces technological, nancial, social, and oth-
erwise of the moment in which we live. His art does not
merely reect or absorb its context, be it a gallery, home,
magazine, billboard, or museum. It gives as much as it
takes, drawing in its surroundings and illuminating them
with a peculiar truth-telling aura. Ive already described
this process with respect to a number of Koonss works
and even to the artist himself, but his masterpiece in this
regard is Puppy. On its own, the topiary terrier can be
seen as a lovable if monstrously hypertrophied embodi-
ment of our abiding affection for dogs and owers. But
for all its obdurate heft it remains surprisingly supple. The
rst time I saw it was outside Frank Gehrys Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao, where it pointed to our then-dawning
yen for new cultural monuments, from destination archi-
tecture to site-specic installations. A few years later it
surfaced at that beacon of capitalism, Rockefeller Center,
looking smaller and less picturesque but more hotwired
to its site than any public sculpture Ive seen. Suddenly, I
took notice of the tacky owers lining the mall and sprout-
ing from planters above the ice rink, while tourists and
businessmen alike delighted before a golden calf for a
new gilded age. And a few years after that I encountered
it on a sylvan Connecticut estate, where it served as both
a trophy and a symbol of fealty, braiding together ideals
of the cultivated and the natural within its shaggy coat.
Wherever Koonss works are, they wondrously refocus
their surroundings. They channel and provoke our vani-
ties and desires, our sense of discovery and mortality, and
sometimes our moral pique and joy. They take as much
as they can from the world in which we live and offer in
return a powerful picture of it. We could ask for more
from art, but I doubt that we will nd it.
NOTES
1. Smith quoted in Alan Jones, Jeff Koons, Arts, November 1983,
11; ibid.
2. Allan Schwartzman, Corporate Culture: The Yippie-Yuppie
Artist, Manhattan, Inc., December 1987, 137; Richard Lacayo,
Artist Jeff Koons Makes, and Earns, Giant Figures, People
Weekly, May 8, 1989, 128; Adam Gopnik, The Art World: Lost
and Found, New Yorker, February 20, 1989, 107.
3. Robert Rosenblum, Jeff Koons: Christ and the Lamb, Artforum,
September 1993, 148.
4. Paul Taylor, The Hot Four, New York, October 27, 1986, 53;
Linda Van Nunen, Loony Koons, Studio, February 1, 1991,
89; Kathryn Tully, The Most Expensive Art Ever Sold at Auction:
Christies Record-Breaking Sale, Forbes, November 13, 2013,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryntully/2013/11/13/the-
most-expensive-art-ever-sold-at-auction-christies-record-
breaking-sale/.
5. Jerry Saltz, Jeffersonian Koons, Village Voice, June 20, 2000;
Peter Schjeldahl, The Blooming Beast, New Yorker, July 3, 2000,
76; Freedman quoted in Shaila K. Dewan, No Walking, Just
Watering for This Puppy, New York Times, June 6, 2000.
6. Joe La Placa, The Candyman Can, ArtReview, April 2003, 49;
Julie L. Belcove, Koons World, W, November 2006, 312; Ingrid
Sischy, Koons, High and Low, Vanity Fair, March 2001, 226.
7. Richard Dorment, Smile! Its Jeff Koons, Telegraph (London),
July 7, 2009; Luke Crisell, Inside the Artists Studio, Nylon Guys,
Summer 2006, 116.
8. Blake Gopnik, Man From Mars Comes in Peace, Washington
Post, June 17, 2008.
9. Schwartzman ascribes this sentiment to Koonss critics, in
Schwartzman, The Yippie-Yuppie Artist, 137.
10. Most monographic publications on Koons hew to a chronological
structure according to his various series, which are often preceded
by texts and quotations by Koons elaborating the given body of
work. The most comprehensive overview of his work is found in
Katy Siegels illuminating texts in Jeff Koons, ed. Hans Werner
Holzwarth (Cologne: Taschen, 2009).
11. Matthew Collings, You are a White Man, Jeff . . . , Modern
Painters, Summer 1989, 62.
12. Ruth Lopez, Conversation: Jeff Koons, Chicago Magazine, May
30, 2008, http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/
June-2008/Conversation-Jeff-Koons/.
13. Koons cites these inuences and discusses his early years in
Chicago and New York in Alan Jones, Jeff Koons (interview),
Tema Celeste, November December 2001, 36 39. This period
is also well recounted in Daniel Pinchbeck, Kitsch and Tell,
Connoisseur, November 1991, 3036, 124 25.
14. Jones, Jeff Koons (interview), 36.
15. Steinbachs 1979 exhibition Display #7 at Artists Space in
New York, for example, included store-bought objects, such
as a teapot, presented on wall-mounted shelving. See Haim
Steinbach, exh. cat. (Rivoli: Castello di Rivoli, Museo dArte
Contemporanea, 1995).
16. Jeff Koons, By Jeff Koons, Art Criticism 7, no. 1, February 1989, 29.
17. Although many of the works in The New bear hyphenated dates
that extend as far as 1987, the rst date indicates the year in
which the work was conceived. Koons was unable to execute all
of them at that initial moment, given the expense of fabrication,
and completed some later as funding allowed.
18. Koons has discussed these childhood experiences in many inter-
views over the past twenty years, but he relates his interest in the
readymade to his fathers decorating store in great depth in his
2013 conversation with Pharrell Williams: Jeff Koons & Pharrell:
Affirmation Abstration Acceptance, ARTST TLK, Reserve
Channel, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjqajvmkxM.
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34
19. Jeffrey Deitch in conversation with the author, September 2013.
20. Koons quoted in Holzwarth, ed., Jeff Koons, 142. Koons expands
on his thinking behind this series with great clarity in By Jeff
Koons, 31.
21. Alan Jones, The Art of the Slam Dunk, NY Talk, May 1985, 47.
22. Indebted to Jean Baudrillards writing on the simulacrum,
simulation art, along with Neo-Geo, was one of the early
movements with which Koons was associated. For more on
the relationship to Baudrilliard, see Pamela M. Lee, Love and
Basketball, in this volume.
23. John Caldwell, Jeff Koons: The Way We Live Now, in Jeff Koons,
exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
1992), 10.
24. Rabbits capacity to spark multiple (sometimes contradictory)
readings is perhaps best indicated by the voluminous criti-
cal exegesis it has inspired, including articles devoted almost
exclusively to it. See, for example, Jerry Saltz, The Dark Side of
the Rabbit: Notes on a Sculpture by Jeff Koons, Arts, February
1988, 26 27; Kirk Varnedoe, Jeff Koonss Rabbit, Artforum,
April 2003, 90.
25. Koons quoted in Holzwarth, ed., Jeff Koons, 240. The artist
would continue to speak of the readymade in the following
years, for example, referring to Cicciolina as a kind of human
readymade that he incorporated into his work. However, this
usage strays from the more standard understanding of the
readymade as an industrially fabricated object, to which Koons
returned in Popeye.
26. Artist Josiah McElheny offers a cogent reading of Koons in this
tradition, as well as in relation to younger artists following in
his wake, in McElheny, Readymade Resistance: On Art and
the Forms of Industrial Production, Artforum, October 2007,
327 35.
27. In this sense Koonss adherence to the readymade aligns him
with a broader strain of twentieth-century anti-subjective
art that also includes noncompositional strategies such as
chance, the monochrome, and seriality. These operations and
devices have been employed by gures as diverse as Alexander
Rodchenko, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt art-
ists with whom Koons is not usually associated, but who make for
productive, if understudied, comparisons in relation to Koonss
objective inclinations. Yve-Alain Bois has been perhaps the
most compelling champion of this noncompositional narra-
tive, as evidenced by his essay Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-
Composition in Its Many Guises, in Yve-Alain Bois, Jack Cowart,
and Alfred Pacquement, Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France,
1948 1954, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of
Art, 1992), 17 22.
28. Giancarlo Politi, Luxury and Desire: An Interview with Jeff
Koons, Flash Art, no. 132, February/March 1987, 73.
29. Ibid., 72.
30. Since the early 1980s this dichotomy has certainly been chal-
lenged as a false one by many sophisticated theorists and art
historians, as exemplied in the compelling writing of Thomas
Crow. Yet no matter how blurred these categories have grown,
some tacit acceptance of a distinction between high and low
remains as a fundamental critical premise that, ironically, allows
for their yet further muddling.
31. Jeff Koons, exh. cat. (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2012), 24.
32. Ibid., 24 26.
33. Peter Carlsen, Jeff Koons, Contemporanea 1, no. 3,
September October 1988, 41.
34. Collings, You are a White Man, Jeff . . . , 62.
35. Hilton Kramer, Koons Show in the City Succeeds in Carrying
Things to a New Low, New York Observer, December 19, 1988;
Arthur C. Danto, The 1989 Whitney Biennial, The Nation,
June 5, 1989, 788; Sidney Tillim, Ideology and Difference:
Reections on Olitski and Koons, Arts, March 1989, 51; Gopnik,
Lost and Found, 107.
36. Dorothy Seiberling, Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living
Painter in the United States? Life, August 8, 1949, 42 45;
Jackson Pollocks Abstractions, Vogue, March 1, 1951, 156 59.
37. The relationship of artists to a burgeoning media and celeb-
rity culture has been a topic of intense scholarly and curatorial
inquiry over the past decade. For example, Courbets relation-
ship to nineteenth-century media culture is perceptively ana-
lyzed in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in
France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
38. The discussion in this section of the essay draws on my text
Made in Heaven: Jeff Koons and the Invention of the Art Star,
in Pop Life: Art in a Material World, ed. Jack Bankowsky, Alison
M. Gingeras, and Catherine Wood, exh. cat. (London: Tate
Publishing, 2009), 37 45. Bankowsky and Gingeras are among
the most important commentators on contemporary artists rela-
tionships to celebrity and the market, as well as the ways in which
certain gures use those structures as a self-reexive and even
performative aspect of their work. See also Gingeras, Lives of
the Artists, Tate Etc., no. 1, Summer 2004; Bankowsky, Pop
Life, in Pop Life, 19 35. Isabelle Graw is another crucial voice
in this dialogue; see her High Price: Art between the Market and
Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010) and her essay,
Life as a Resource, in this volume.
39. Taylor, The Hot Four, 50 56.
40. The performative aspect of these ads was persuasively analyzed by
Andrew Renton in Jeff Koons and the Art of the Deal: Marketing
(as) Sculpture, Performance, September 1990, 18 29.
41. Meg Cox, Feeling Victimized? Then Strike Back: Become an
Artist, Wall Street Journal, February 13, 1989; Lacayo, Artist
Jeff Koons Makes, and Earns, Giant Figures.
42. Collings, You are a White Man, Jeff . . . , 64.
43. Andrew Renton, Jeff Koons: I Have My Finger on the Eternal
(interview), Flash Art, no. 153, Summer 1990, 111.
44. See, for example, Renton, Jeff Koons; Dodie Kazanjian, Koons
Crazy, Vogue, August 1990, 338 43, 384 85; Sarah Morris
and Remo Guidieri, Jeff Koons (interview), Galeries Magazine,
April May 1990, 126 33.
45. Sylvre Lotringer noted this effect: The threat, or the chal-
lenge, that Koons raises with his work and persona (and they
are one) must be pretty powerful to provoke this sudden hysteri-
cal retreat into humanistic values that a decade of postmodern
theory had apparently left speechless. Lotringer, Immaculate
Conceptualism, Artscribe, February/March 1992, 24.
46. The information in this paragraph derives from my research in
Koonss archive, which contains clippings gathered by a profes-
sional press service to which Koons subscribed at this time. An
Associated Press report on the marriage appeared in the Sedalia
Democrat on December 5, 1990; Fresno Bee, Wanna Bet? May
19, 1991.
47. These themes were addressed in the copious reviews of the show.
See, for example, Michael Kimmelman, Jeff Koons, Sonnabend
Gallery, New York Times, November 29, 1991; and Brooks Adams,
Jeff Koons at Sonnabend, Art in America, March 1992, 11718.
48. The aftermath of Koonss relationship with Staller has been
chronicled in many articles on the artist. See, for example,
Sischy, Koons, High and Low.
49. Krauss quoted in Paul Taylor, The Art of P.R., and Vice Versa,
New York Times, October 27, 1991.
50. Richard Flood, Lighting, Artforum, May 1981, 70.
51. See, for example, Schwartzman, The Yippie-Yuppie Artist;
Taylor, The Hot Four; Matthew Collings, Mythologies: Art
and the Market, Artscribe, April/May 1986, 22 26; Douglas C.
McGill, The Lower East Sides New Artists, New York Times,
June 3, 1986.
No Limits
52. Peter Schjeldahl, Jeff Koons: Can His Silver Bunny Hold All That
Hot Air? 7 Days, July 12, 1989, 14.
53. Siegel in Holzwarth, ed., Jeff Koons, 107 8.
54. Hal Foster incisively explores this dynamic in The Return of the
Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
55. Koons, By Jeff Koons, 32 33.
56. This debate has been one of the dening tropes of Koonss critical
reception. The artist himself discussed this tension with his peers
Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, Sherrie Levine, Haim Steinbach,
and Philip Taaffe in a roundtable moderated by Peter Nagy, From
Criticism to Complicity, Flash Art, no. 129, Summer 1986, 46 49.
57. A Machiavellian Innocence: Conversation with Rem Koolhaas
and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Jeff Koons,
The Conversation Series 22 (Cologne: Walther Knig, 2012), 7.
58. Even writers ostensibly more focused on Koonss art than on his
market could scarcely resist mentioning his past employment;
see, for example, Calvin Tomkins, Between Neo- and Post-,
New Yorker, November 24, 1986, 104.
59. Schwartzman, The Yippie-Yuppie Artist, 139 40.
60. The Celebration series was initially backed by Jeffrey Deitch,
Anthony dOffay, and Max Hetzler. Koonss nancial and fabri-
cation problems related to the series were widely reported; see,
for example, Kelly Devine Thomas, The Selling of Jeff Koons,
Artnews, May 2005, 120.
61. The Celebration Economy: Conversation with Rem Koolhaas
and Hans Ulrich Obrist, in Obrist, ed., Jeff Koons, 56 57.
62. Anthony Haden-Guest, Art or Commerce? Vanity Fair,
November 1991, 257.
63. That same year Koons reunited with his former dealer Ileana
Sonnabend, with whom he had split following Made in Heaven.
In the early 2000s Larry Gagosian took on that project after
Koonss contract with his three initial backers had expired, and
he began putting up funds to complete the works.
64. I have discussed this aspect of Murakamis practice in relation
to Warhols precedent, and peripherally to Koons, in Takashi
Murakami: Company Man, in Murakami, exh. cat. (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 128 59.
65. Peter Schjeldahl, Looney Koons, 7 Days, December 14, 1988,
66. For Mather on Bouguereau, see Robert Jensen, Marketing
Modernism in Fin-de-Sicle Europe (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 20; for Koons on his relationship to his
bourgeois patrons, see Burke & Hare, From Full Fathom Five
(interview), Parkett, no. 19, 1989, 44 45.
66. Koons has spoken of this aspect of the Balloon Dog as its darker
side. See David Bowie, Super-Banalism and the Innocent
Salesman, Modern Painters, Spring 1998, 32. This image is
also insightfully analyzed by Achim Hochdrfer in The Gift of
Art in this volume.
67. Koons has remarked, I dont care about craft. At the end of the
day its not about the object, it has to do with the viewer; The
Celebration Economy, 56.
68. These documents are found in the archive of Koonss New York
studio.
69. Koons describes the genesis and iconography of the Celebration
series particularly well in Dialogues on Self-Acceptance, in Jeff
Koons (Fondation Beyeler), 32 36.
70. I have chronicled the making of Play-Doh in greater depth and
within the context of Koonss highly inventive approach to paint-
ing in Jeff Koons, Painter, in Jeff Koons: Hulk Elvis, exh. cat.
(London: Gagosian Gallery, 2009).
71. Ingrid Sischy, The Cat Is Out of the Bag (interview), Interview,
February 1997, 92.
72. See Kuo, One of a Kind, in this volume.
73. This phrase is the title of a 1987 wall hanging by Kelley that
includes a quilt covered with knit dolls and animals. For Kelley,
the title refers to the guilt that one might feel as an adult in being
unable to pay back the love he or she was shown as a child. In
Koonss case the love hours invested in his objects are part of
the emotional payoff they deliver to their viewers.
74. Schwartzman ascribes this sentiment to Koonss fans, in
Schwartzman, The Yippie-Yuppie Artist, 137.
75. Schjeldahl, Looney Koons, 66; Sherrie Levine, Big Fun:
Four Reactions to the New Jeff Koons, Artscribe, March/April
1989, 48; Eric Gibson, Decade in Review, Sculpture 8, no. 3,
May June 1989, 23. Ned Rifkin, then the chief curator of the
Hirshhorn Museum, expressed a similar sentiment, claiming, If
I were to make an award for the Artist of the Eighties, it would
be . . . to Jeff Koons. Rifkin quoted in Kazanjian, Koons Crazy,
343.
76. Renato Barilli, Jeff Koons, LUomo Vogue, March 1992, 131;
Jerry Saltz, When the Low Went Very High, New York, December
6, 2009, 62.
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Scott Rothkopf