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Appreciating contemporary art
Jeff Koons: A Certified Extra-Terrestrial
One of the weirdest and most mystifying artists alive today. He is surely as great a celebrant of our existential vacuity and glitzy nihilism as Warhol.
Jeff Koons bewilders the artworld. No one is sure whether he is good or bad, or just plain nothing at all. Critics feel free to be scathing. ‘Anuses on rods’ is how his latest large-scale public sculpture ‘Bouquet of Tulips’ (2019), was described by Yves Michaud in the French press recently, and the work itself was vandalised with the graffiti tag ‘bouquet of arseholes’. The piece is supposed to be a memorial to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan terror attack in Paris, and it is as good a point as any with which to begin a discussion of Jeff Koons and the whole of his artistic adventure.
The facts: Koons has established himself as a major figure in the contemporary artworld, regularly selling individual works for tens of millions of dollars. Most people with an interest in modern art have heard of him, and could probably identify something that he has created, even if only in passing. This makes him a genuine A-lister of sorts. Yet there is no general agreement as to his ultimate meaning and value in what might be called…
