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Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons (born January 21 1955) is an American artist whose work incorporates kitsch imagery using painting, sculpture, and other forms, often in large scale. His life and work were profiled on CBS Sunday Morning and 60 minutes.
Life and artEarly life and workJeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania; as a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent of visiting him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art. After college, he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker while establishing himself as an artist. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode to Andy Warhol's Factory and the studio of Damien Hirst. Koons's early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is Three Ball 50/50 Tank (1985), consisting of three basket balls floating in distilled water that half-fills a glass tank.Koons carefully cultivated his public persona by employing an image consultant— something that at the time was unheard of for a contemporary artist. As an artwork in their own right, Koons placed full page advertisements in the main international art magazine featuring photographs by Matt Chedgey of himself surrounded by the trappings of success. During personal appearances and interviews, Koons began to refer to himself in the third person. Koons then moved on to Statuary, the large stainless-steel blowups of toys, followed by the Banality series that culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles—said to be the world's largest ceramic— a life-size gold-leaf plated statue of the sitting singer cuddling Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. Three years later it sold at Sotheby's New York for $5.6 million and is now in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The statue was included in a retrospective survey at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo (2004) which traveled to the Helsinki City Art Museum (2005). It was also featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008) in his second retrospective survey there. In November (2007), Koons became the most expensive living artist when his giant stainless-steel Hanging Heart sold at Sotheby's New York for $23.6 million, only to be topped in July 2008 by his Balloon Flower (Magenta) selling for a record $25.7 million at Christie?s in London. Other large sculptures from his Celebration series were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2008). Marriage 1991In 1991, he married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian porn star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) who for five years (1987?1992) pursued an alternate career as a member of the Italian parliament. His Made in Heaven [1] series of paintings, photos and sculptures portrayed the couple in explicit sexual positions and created even more controversy. In 1992, they had a son Ludwig. The marriage ended soon after. They agreed joint custody but Staller absconded from New York to Rome with the child, where mother and son remain, despite the award in 1998 of sole custody to Koons by the US courts which had dissolved the marriage. In 2008, Staller filed suit against Koons for failing to pay child support.[2] Puppy 1992
Puppy in Bilbao. 
Tulips, by Jeff Koons, in Bilbao. The piece was purchased in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. Before the dedication at the museum, a trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots near the sculpture http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/news/robinson/robinson10-14-97.asp but were foiled by Bilbao police. In the summer of 2000, the artwork travelled to New York City for a temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center. Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, have an exact Jeff Koons duplicate of the Bilbao statue on the grounds of their Connecticut estate. Recent workIn 1999, Koons commissioned a song about himself on Momus' album Stars Forever. In 2001, he undertook a series of paintings titled, Easyfun-Ethereal, using a collage approach that combined bikinis (with the bodies removed), food, and landscapes painted under his supervision by assistants. In 2006, he appeared on Artstar, an unscripted television series set in the New York art world. On November 14 2007, his sculpture Hanging Heart sold at Sotheby's auction house for $23.6 million becoming, at the time, the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned. It was bought by the Gagosian Gallery which also purchased another Koons sculpture entitled "Diamond (Blue)" for $11.8 million from Christie's auction house on Tuesday, November 13, 2007. [3] He rendered a drawing similar to his Tulip Balloons for placement on the front page of the Internet search engine Google. The drawing greeted all who visited Google's main page on April 30 2008 and May 1 2008. [4] A Koons sculpture resembling a balloon model sold recently for a record £12.9m at Christie's in London. Cracked Egg (blue) won the 2008 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/secure/files/wollaston-award-announcement-295.pdf ClassificationAmong curators and art collectors and others in the art world Koons's work is labeled as Neo-pop or Post-Pop as part of an 80s movement in reaction to the pared-down art of Minimalism and Conceptualism in the previous decade. Koons resists such comments: "A viewer might at first see irony in my work... but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation." Koon's crucial point is to reject any hidden meaning in his artwork. The meaning is only what one perceives at first glance; there is no gap between what the work is in itself and what is perceived. He has caused controversy by the elevation of unashamed kitsch into the high art arena, exploiting more throwaway subjects than, for example, Warhol's soup cans. His work Balloon Dog (1994-2000) is based on balloons twisted into shape to make a toy dog. His sculpture differs in two major respects to the original:
Evaluation and InfluenceKoons has received extreme reactions to his work. Supporters claim (for Balloon Dog) "an awesome presence... a massive durable monument" (Amy Dempsey, ed. Styles, Schools and Movements, 2002, Thames & Hudson), and for other work that it is possible to be "wowed by the technical virtuosity and eye-popping visual blast" (Jerry Saltz, art critic) [5] However, Mark Stevens of The New Republic dismissed him as a "decadent artist [who] lacks the imaginative will to do more than trivialize and italicise his themes and the tradition in which he works... He is another of those who serve the tacky rich." Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times saw "one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the 1980s" and called Koons' work "artificial," "cheap" and "unabashedly cynical." Koons has received recognition by his peers. In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has had an influence on younger artists such as Damien Hirst (e.g. in Hirst's Hymn, an eighteen-foot version of a fourteen-inch anatomical toy), and Mona Hatoum. In turn, his extreme enlargement of mundane objects owes a debt to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Much of his work was also influenced by artists working in Chicago during his study at the Art Institute, including Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke and H. C. Westermann, among others.[6] Copyright litigationKoons has been sued several times for copyright infringement over his use of pre-existing images in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies Koons also lost lawsuits in United Features Syndicate, Inc. v. Koons, 817 F. Supp. 370 (S.D.N.Y. 1993), and Campbell v. Koons, No. 91 Civ. 6055, 1993 WL 97381 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 1, 1993). More recently, he won a lawsuit in Blanch v. Koons, No. 03 Civ. 8026 (LLS), S.D.N.Y., Nov. 1 2005 (slip op.), http://www.cll.com/articles/article.cfm?articleid=239#1, affirmed by the Second Circuit in October, 2006, brought over his use of a photographic advertisement as source material for legs and feet in a painting, Niagara (2000). The court ruled that Koons had sufficiently transformed the original advertisement so as to qualify as a fair use. PhilanthropyKoons donated a private tour of his studio to the Hereditary Disease Foundation for auction on charitybuzz.com. The auction ran from February 15 to March 6, 2008. Controversy in Versailles"Jeff Koons Versailles", an exhibition of 17 Koons sculptures at the Chateau de Versailles (September 10 - December 14, 2008), marked the first time that the chateau has organized an ambitious display of an American contemporary artist, and is also considered Mr. Koons' first retrospective in France. The National Union of Writers of France, a right-wing group dedicated to French artistic purity, has been organizing protests at the palace gates, demanding the cancellation of an exhibition that they describe as "a truly sullying of the most sacred aspects of our heritage and identity." Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky, the group's chairman, added that the display "strikes at the heart of a civilization" and "is an outrage to Marie Antoinette http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/arts/design/11koon.html?scp=2&sq=versailles&st=cse." Notes and references
Further reading
Film and video
External links
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