Shiny, seductive and profoundly depressing
10
1GT
Friday January 9 2015 | the times
the times | Friday January 9 2015
11
1GT ABACA/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
visual art arts
visualarts art
Shiny, seductive and profoundly depressing
REX FEATURES
Collectors have been as quick to snap up Jeff Koons’s work as visitors are to queue up for his new show in Paris. Nancy Durrant just can’t see the appeal
T
he queues for the Pompidou Centre are insane, owing to the recent opening of an “exhaustive” retrospective of work by the American artist Jeff Koons. According to reports, the show racked up visitor numbers of more than 112,000 in its first 17 days and is on course to become the Pompidou’s most popular exhibition (previously that accolade belonged to last year’s Dalí exhibition).
Koons is the most expensive living artist. Why?
Koons is the world’s most expensive living artist — in 2013 his Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie’s New York for a cool $58.4 million (£38.7 million). Walking round this show, jolly as it is, I cannot for the life of me think why. Once you finally get in there, the exhibition is more or less open-plan, with the exception of a specially created room housing the sexually explicit Made in Heaven series (the queue for this snaked slightly self-consciously around most of the main space when I visited).
scale, does not elevate. Here it diminishes. Among the Antiquities, the shiny reproductions of classical works reduce the meticulously copied originals, just by dint of colour and surface, to tacky lumps. Balloon Venus, a huge piece based on the teeny-weeny Willendorf Venus (made about 25,000 years ago), strips this intense, fundamentally sensual object of every scrap of its not inconsiderable power. What’s the point? The show takes a chronological approach and groups the works according to their series — Inflatables, Equilibrium, Statuary, Luxury and Degradation, Banality, EasyFun, among others — making it easy to navigate. That most of the wall texts appreciated by the upper echelons.” are broadly nonsense is also rather Leaving aside the notion that this liberating. The visitor won’t find much was precisely the sort of assumption to trouble his or her pretty head — that advertisers wanted to prey on, you are free to enjoy the shiny toys. this is a weirdly Soviet view. “I want And the shiny toys are all here. my work to be accessible to people,” Rabbit; Lifeboat; Michael Jackson and Koons recently said. This is absolutely Bubbles; the Hoovers in a glass vitrine; no bad thing, but once they have Balloon Dog (Magenta); the basketballs accessed it, what then? Even when, in suspended in a tank (Koons consulted his Antiquities series, he slavishly a Nobel prize-winning physicist references art history (and he has by for those); Lobster . . . you’ve seen all accounts an astonishing art them all in glossy reproduction. collection of his own — that’s an The experience of seeing them in exhibition I’d like to see), there reality is maddeningly punctuated appears to be little substance beneath by near-constant, shrill beeps as the surface. By using pop cultural selfie-snapping punters roam too close imagery and underpinning it with not to the works’ immaculate surfaces. very much so that the “people” can Koons is a sort of self-styled understand it, you patronise them spokesman for middle-class folk; shamefully. There is nothing wrong it is the trappings of with a viewer having their world that he to do a little work. appropriates for his Otherwise he or she art. When he realised, might just as well go in the Eighties, that shopping. the aesthetic used One of the works in alcohol advertising in the Banality changed according series, Fait d’Hiver, to the social class has been removed at which it was from display (not aimed, he reprinted that you’d know several of the ads it) following a legal on canvas as part claim by an of the Luxury and advertising creative, Degradation series Franck Davidovici, (congratulations, that it plagiarises his One Ball Total Jeff, for spotting 1985 advertisement Equilibrium Tank that advertising for the French (1985) and, above left, is and almost clothing brand Naf sculptures such always has been Naf. The museum as Popeye would one of the most has said that the not be out of place psychologically sculpture’s owner in Disneyland Paris sophisticated media). requested that Says the Pompidou: it be removed for “According to the unspecified reasons. artist, this implied This is the fourth that certain forms case brought against of art, including Koons regarding abstraction, were a work from this discriminatory, as series; so far he they could only be has lost two out of
three. (Another sculpture from the series, Naked, has also not been included. The artist and the museum recently received a complaint from a photographer’s widow alleging that the sculpture infringed her husband’s copyright, but the museum maintains the sculpture has been left out because of damage in transit). These troubles appear not to have diminished Koons’s appeal, but for all this man of the people’s dislike of elitism, the question over his regard for the rights of other creative people leaves an unpleasant taste. Since I mentioned to them that I didn’t like this show, friends have plaintively asked whether I at least appreciate the technical virtuosity in the construction of these sculptures. Indeed, they are superbly made by the teams of technicians who create them. Koons is, if nothing else, a very demanding client. And individually there is a certain appeal in the way some of them play with weight and material — Red Heart, part of the Celebration series, seems to hang lightly, like the cheap decoration it mimics, despite weighing more than a tonne. You want to reach out with your pen and “ting” works like Lobster, Balloon Dog and Hulk (Organ), so intriguing is the idea that they are not, in fact, made of inflatable plastic. But I like these in the way that I like the most grandstanding works by Anish Kapoor: they are hollow theatre. Kids pose for photos in front of Popeye, mimicking his strongman stance. They might as well be a few miles away at Disneyland Paris; they’d
almost certainly have a more meaningful emotional experience if they were. Polished stainless steel, it turns out, even on a borderline monumental
Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). Below: one of the Balloon Dog series. Above right: Hanging Heart (1999)
There is something profoundly depressing about seeing all these works gathered in one place. Shiny and seductive though it is, I just don’t buy it. Which is lucky really, since neither I nor the masses for whom Koons claims he makes his art could ever, ever afford to do so. Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris (centrepompidou.fr), to Apr 27
1GT
Friday January 9 2015 | the times
the times | Friday January 9 2015
11
1GT ABACA/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
visual art arts
visualarts art
Shiny, seductive and profoundly depressing
REX FEATURES
Collectors have been as quick to snap up Jeff Koons’s work as visitors are to queue up for his new show in Paris. Nancy Durrant just can’t see the appeal
T
he queues for the Pompidou Centre are insane, owing to the recent opening of an “exhaustive” retrospective of work by the American artist Jeff Koons. According to reports, the show racked up visitor numbers of more than 112,000 in its first 17 days and is on course to become the Pompidou’s most popular exhibition (previously that accolade belonged to last year’s Dalí exhibition).
Koons is the most expensive living artist. Why?
Koons is the world’s most expensive living artist — in 2013 his Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie’s New York for a cool $58.4 million (£38.7 million). Walking round this show, jolly as it is, I cannot for the life of me think why. Once you finally get in there, the exhibition is more or less open-plan, with the exception of a specially created room housing the sexually explicit Made in Heaven series (the queue for this snaked slightly self-consciously around most of the main space when I visited).
scale, does not elevate. Here it diminishes. Among the Antiquities, the shiny reproductions of classical works reduce the meticulously copied originals, just by dint of colour and surface, to tacky lumps. Balloon Venus, a huge piece based on the teeny-weeny Willendorf Venus (made about 25,000 years ago), strips this intense, fundamentally sensual object of every scrap of its not inconsiderable power. What’s the point? The show takes a chronological approach and groups the works according to their series — Inflatables, Equilibrium, Statuary, Luxury and Degradation, Banality, EasyFun, among others — making it easy to navigate. That most of the wall texts appreciated by the upper echelons.” are broadly nonsense is also rather Leaving aside the notion that this liberating. The visitor won’t find much was precisely the sort of assumption to trouble his or her pretty head — that advertisers wanted to prey on, you are free to enjoy the shiny toys. this is a weirdly Soviet view. “I want And the shiny toys are all here. my work to be accessible to people,” Rabbit; Lifeboat; Michael Jackson and Koons recently said. This is absolutely Bubbles; the Hoovers in a glass vitrine; no bad thing, but once they have Balloon Dog (Magenta); the basketballs accessed it, what then? Even when, in suspended in a tank (Koons consulted his Antiquities series, he slavishly a Nobel prize-winning physicist references art history (and he has by for those); Lobster . . . you’ve seen all accounts an astonishing art them all in glossy reproduction. collection of his own — that’s an The experience of seeing them in exhibition I’d like to see), there reality is maddeningly punctuated appears to be little substance beneath by near-constant, shrill beeps as the surface. By using pop cultural selfie-snapping punters roam too close imagery and underpinning it with not to the works’ immaculate surfaces. very much so that the “people” can Koons is a sort of self-styled understand it, you patronise them spokesman for middle-class folk; shamefully. There is nothing wrong it is the trappings of with a viewer having their world that he to do a little work. appropriates for his Otherwise he or she art. When he realised, might just as well go in the Eighties, that shopping. the aesthetic used One of the works in alcohol advertising in the Banality changed according series, Fait d’Hiver, to the social class has been removed at which it was from display (not aimed, he reprinted that you’d know several of the ads it) following a legal on canvas as part claim by an of the Luxury and advertising creative, Degradation series Franck Davidovici, (congratulations, that it plagiarises his One Ball Total Jeff, for spotting 1985 advertisement Equilibrium Tank that advertising for the French (1985) and, above left, is and almost clothing brand Naf sculptures such always has been Naf. The museum as Popeye would one of the most has said that the not be out of place psychologically sculpture’s owner in Disneyland Paris sophisticated media). requested that Says the Pompidou: it be removed for “According to the unspecified reasons. artist, this implied This is the fourth that certain forms case brought against of art, including Koons regarding abstraction, were a work from this discriminatory, as series; so far he they could only be has lost two out of
three. (Another sculpture from the series, Naked, has also not been included. The artist and the museum recently received a complaint from a photographer’s widow alleging that the sculpture infringed her husband’s copyright, but the museum maintains the sculpture has been left out because of damage in transit). These troubles appear not to have diminished Koons’s appeal, but for all this man of the people’s dislike of elitism, the question over his regard for the rights of other creative people leaves an unpleasant taste. Since I mentioned to them that I didn’t like this show, friends have plaintively asked whether I at least appreciate the technical virtuosity in the construction of these sculptures. Indeed, they are superbly made by the teams of technicians who create them. Koons is, if nothing else, a very demanding client. And individually there is a certain appeal in the way some of them play with weight and material — Red Heart, part of the Celebration series, seems to hang lightly, like the cheap decoration it mimics, despite weighing more than a tonne. You want to reach out with your pen and “ting” works like Lobster, Balloon Dog and Hulk (Organ), so intriguing is the idea that they are not, in fact, made of inflatable plastic. But I like these in the way that I like the most grandstanding works by Anish Kapoor: they are hollow theatre. Kids pose for photos in front of Popeye, mimicking his strongman stance. They might as well be a few miles away at Disneyland Paris; they’d
almost certainly have a more meaningful emotional experience if they were. Polished stainless steel, it turns out, even on a borderline monumental
Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). Below: one of the Balloon Dog series. Above right: Hanging Heart (1999)
There is something profoundly depressing about seeing all these works gathered in one place. Shiny and seductive though it is, I just don’t buy it. Which is lucky really, since neither I nor the masses for whom Koons claims he makes his art could ever, ever afford to do so. Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is at the Pompidou Centre, Paris (centrepompidou.fr), to Apr 27
