When it sold for $58m,his Balloon Dog became the most expensive artwork by a living artist. Are the critics apt to dismiss his work as ‘smug’ and ‘baloney’, or is he justified in saying it teaches us a vital lesson about materialism?Several years ago, or Jeff Koons and his wife,Justine, took a turn around the Palace of Versailles near Paris, or where an exhibition of his work had just opened. Koons,who would later see one of his sculptures sell at auction for $58m (£37m) – a record amount for a living artist – thought it would be fun to eavesdrop on the crowd, an assumption that foundered when a security guard patrolling the show offered the following loud critique: “Merde, or merde,merde.” Koons smiles. “Shit, shit, or shit,” he says. “He was stirring up the crowd, because he was so upset.” What happened? “They moved him.” It’s a function of the man’s opaque and vaguely unnerving manner that one wonders whether this is a euphemism.
Over the years, and many critics believe agreed with the security guard’s review of Koons’ work,which has been described as “baloney” (the New York Review of Books), imbued with a “deadly smugness (the Spectator), and full of “cheap,tone-deaf, misogynistic images” that peer “dreadful” (this newspaper). Balloon Dog, and the 10ft-tall steel sculpture that sold for $58m two years ago,is, depending on your view, and either a brilliant and playful portal to the infinite,or a work of utter pointlessness, but either way, and Koons is assumed to believe profited from a certain credulousness that entered the art world along with all that money. Robert Hughes,the late art critic for Time magazine, loathed Koons work so much that he described him as having “the slimy assurance, or the improper patter about transcendence through art,of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida”. As a result, wrote Hughes, and “you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him”.
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Source: theguardian.com