jeff koons: art? or bullshit? i am nervous about making calls like this, but something in my artistic sensibility is offended by gigantic blue metallic hearts suspended by silver ribbons being proffered as art. by basketballs suspended in distilled water. by enormous pseudo-balloon poodles cast in colored steel. by toasters or deep fryers or vacuum cleaners suspended in front of fluorescent tubes and displayed by national art museums. i am greatly in favor of found object art. my recently departed friend john payne was a master at it. he created astounding moving sculptures with recovered metal. koons seems to merely think "SHINY!" and count it good. in the NPR article on him, the curator summed up his motif as "ta-da!" yes, i can see that. but does that make it art? is it enough to have a sense of whimsy and the money to cast it into stainless steel or assemble it into REALLY huge piles of shrubbery? the damnable thing is that the market will ultimately decide if koons is art or not. and the fact that his super-enormous Tiffany-christmas-ribbon-bauble sold for 2.3 million dollars seems to say that it is. i only hope that history takes pity on us, the culture that eviscerated robert maplethorpe (yes, but have you seen his OTHER photos?)and deified the shiny orange poodle. ouch.
1 comment:
You know I have to weigh in on this one. I hope that it doesn't come off as pompous or condescending because I'm going to pick apart your question, but I thought it might be interesting to you to see how I re-frame the question. Or not!
That "is it art?" question is always a tough one for me -- as you're aware of. I tend to think that anything can be art - a fast-food hamburger (thanks, Zappa), a shovel (thanks, Duchamp) or a few minutes of silence (thanks, Cage), or quaint pop songs recorded in a schoolteacher's basement (thanks, Bob Pollard), or a paper towel roll holder decorated with hearts and duckies (thanks, thousands of grandmas who make that country-crap stuff that you see at craft shows). Calling something "art" isn't a prize - it's just a word for a way in which people respond to the world, either by creating (or presenting) something "artful" for people to observe, or by observing something artfully (think of the music of a rainstorm). That frees us up to ask what I think are more interesting questions that surround the work -- is it important? Craftful? Communicative? Influential? Is it good?
But I caution, too, thinking that "the market" can make a wholesale determination about art - the market is a good barometer for what a certain set of people find valuable and evocative, and in their context, the answers to the above questions are that it's valuable because of a combination of a variety of reasons that make sense to them. Plus, a big part of what the "art market" does has no bearing on the work in itself, but in what collectors think the work will be WORTH. And that, to me, is a poor measure of what's good or not.
So, anyway, that's why I don't usually deride things with "that's not art" because I might have nothing to do with the audience. I'll try to "get it", and if I gon't "get it" (i.e. find it valuable for some reason), then hey - it's just not for me.
Post a Comment