ActionScript-ToolBox: by Jeff Koons

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Jeff Koons (Biography)

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Popularity: 1 Vote:	Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.
Popularity: -1 Vote:	I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I think about my work every minute of the day.
Popularity: 0 Vote:	I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	I would prefer a normal-sized breast, or a small breast or whatever and that it be natural, than to understand that it was just some jelly in there.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I'm always trying to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so that they feel open participation.
Popularity: 2 Vote:	I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.
Popularity: 1 Vote:	My objects, maybe not in a traditional sense art, last longer than you or myself. Maybe they'll die off as art, but they are equipped to outsurvive us physically.

Biography

Jeff Koons (born January 21, 1955 in York, Pennsylvania) is an American contemporary artist and sculptor. He worked as a Wall Street commodities broker before becoming famous as an artist in the 1980s.

As the self-proclaimed "most written-about artist in the world," Jeff Koons has attained a "star" pop status rivaling his precursor Andy Warhol. However, the Koons phenomenon -- Koons himself, his objects, and the discursive reception that surrounds it all -- is inherently paradoxical. Koons is made out to be a critical commentator in the tradition of the Dadaists and a controversial figure in the footsteps of the avant-garde, yet his art-historical glory resides in the perception that he is "flat" -- no depth, all surface. This meaninglessness and banality, above all, is his contribution to art.

His work is considered by many to exude a great amount of joy, even as it both appropriates and problematizes pleasurable consumerism. Koons art has been widely plagiarized in the People's Republic of China where consumers continue buying his work despite the threat of lengthy jail terms for possession of these controversial reproductions.

Critics have often been scathing in discussing his work. His "Made In Heaven" exhibition featured photographs and sculptures of Koons having intercourse with his wife, the Italian porn star and politician Cicciolina. Mark Stevens of The New Republic wrote that he was a "decadent artist [because he] 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 wrote it was "one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the" 1980s. "Artificial," "cheap," and "unabashedly cynical," were Kimmelman's labels.

In 1992, Koons was commissioned to create a piece for an art exhibition in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The result was Puppy, a 13-meter (43 foot) tall topiary sculpture of a Scottish Terrier puppy executed in a variety of flowers on a steel substructure. In 1995 the sculpture was dismantled and reerected in Sydney Harbor on a new, more permanent, stainless steel armature with an internal irrigation system. In 1997 the piece was purchased by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Before the dedication of the museum in 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). Bilbao police foiled the scheme. Since its installation, Puppy has become a familiar icon for the city of Bilbao. In the summer of 2000 it travelled to New York City for a temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center.

Koons commissioned a song, about himself, on Momus' 1999 album Stars Forever.