I see in a report from Paris that someone is threatening to sue Jeff Koons for copyright infringement over his depiction of a pig and seminude mannequin. Koons has been accused of infringment before, three times successfully. He has also accused others of copyright violation of his balloon dog. Here in New York I was walking across town the other day and took a photo of these gigantic holiday decorations opposite Radio City Music Hall. So what makes a Koons better than or different from this display, except that these baubles are not meant satirically — unless the thought occurs to you, as it did to me, that you could take them for humongous hand grenades in disguise. Or maybe they’re a Koons in disguise.
Koons isn’t an artist he’s a decorator with too much money on his hands.
Ha. You’d get a lot of pushback from invested collectors and museum curators, of course, and from some major crickets. I went to see a recent Koons show at the Whitney, if only to get a sense of what the ruckus was all about. The line to get in snaked around the block, which I found amazing — doubly so because it was bitterly cold out. When I showed my ticket at the door, an old complimentary museum pass I’d never used, the guard waved me through. Anyway, what struck me most about the show was how dismal and forlorn it looked. I’m not even talking about the pieces themselves, which I found uninspired as satire or anything else. I’m talking about the way the pieces were presented. They looked abandoned, standing on the floor surrounded by empty space, as though at the tail end of a garage sale where half the tchotckies were already gone. It was the most depressing exhibition I’ve ever seen.
Agreed. A charlatan, too, I would add. – L.T., Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts)
Brilliant! Indeed- I recently bought a new vacuum replacing one of those older royal models of 50 years ago. I stuck the royal outside my front door temporarily, and it occurred to me someone one might question why I had an old vacuum sitting there. I will now tell them it is ‘my’ Jeff Koons…
Haw!