``He [Koons] has, according to veteran critic Robert Hughes, `the slimy assurance ... of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida'...''
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Had to look him up. I don't keep track of the art world much any more. When I saw a few images it was enough to know the scene. Been around it a long time ago. I liked some of the guys I knew in LA who followed that path, but didn't care for their art. BTW Ilona's Asshole can be found, but the reproduction is small. Doesn't matter. It looks like all the other amateur porn I used to find, before the crack down in the late 90s.
Here's Ilona:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/__6db0wLu-YE/SAUYidJTMCI/AAAAAAAAAAY/lrRKoKC4cKs/s320/21IlonasAsshole-1.jpg
Now I have to wonder given this approach to art dates back at least forty years when the NYC pop-art grit hit LA to get transformed under what Plagens called the LA Finish Fetish in a whole school of plastic, metal, and high gloss lacquered things... So, I have to wonder... if there are not a lot of old bald guys in Venice asking themselves why in hell they never made a killing like Koons has. Frankly, their art was better on just about every level. It was funnier, slicker, sicker, more ironic, more iconic, and more outright commerical as well as being done up by fabrication shops around the basin, mostly by Mexican-American body shop workers. As for the porn angle. One guy T, who collected variously styled crucifixes. He then place them and other religious icons next to various parts of his girlfriend's erotic zones and openings and photographed the tableaux in gorgeous Kodachrome. These were then blown up to moderately large size.
The real trick back then for the LA crew was getting the money to get the work done. Some of it had to come off drug dealing, cashing in inheritances, moving real estate, playing the ponies...or actually selling a few pieces and putting the money back into more work.
In the background ``..his cleverness in combining the monumental effect of high art with the cheap pleasures of the banal...''
It is interesting to take Koons' point of view and rethink the high classicism of the Italian Renaissance. Consider the subjects like Donatello's David or Michelangelo's David for that matter, and then see them through Koons' perspective. Think about Dante's Florence as depicted in the Inferno. Populate the contemporary streets of Donatello, Michelangelo and Caravaggio's time with those figures, then add the Medici, Borgia, plus Savonarola. That's some pretty sicko society. When I do that mental experiment, the sculptures and paintings start looking a whole lot more like Koons' work than art history would like to admit.
And even more outrageously tacky work is Cellini. In a sense Koons Michael Jackson lap dances with the child cartoon character is straight out of Cellini's studio. Here's Koons:
http://www.leninimports.com/jeff_koons_gallery_4.gif
Now here is Cellini:
http://surveyofwesternart.haloslinkup.net/studymaterial/352_saltcellar_francis_i.jpg
If I was art shopping of course I would buy the Cellini and leave Koons. I wouldn't have any illusions about why I like Cellini. Cellini was a master at making the finish of the work just as erotic and seductive as the figures and richness of detail and variation.
There is a certain aspect to kitch in say the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococco masters that seems to have always flowed through the arts of highly refined cultures... Can't finish the thought, just yet.
CG
