July 04, 2005
Monday Musing: Defending Jeff Koons, or, Why Don't You Like My Puppy?
This short essay is inspired by a comment made by our own Timothy Don in his wonderful Negotiation of June 13th. As I wrote in the comments, Timothy is one of the few people writing on art at the moment I truly enjoy and profit from reading (Arthur Danto being another).
And let's be honest, friends, art criticism is a foul business. Most people engaging in it would get a punch in the nose if they tried to write that way somewhere else. For the most part, it's pretentious, jargon-obsessed junk. As Clement Greenberg once mentioned, "The fact is that most art writers are cold; they're usually people who wouldn't be able to survive writing about anything else." And I'm glad I brought up Clement Greenberg here. The man could write very clearly about what are often difficult ideas. I love the guy. Love to read him, love to think about what he had to say. But it ought to be mentioned here that he was wrong, completely wrong. And Timothy Don is a wonderful writer on art, and he has many Greenbergian impulses and he's sometimes wrong too.
He's not wrong in his impressions and much of his analysis. He's generally hitting the nail on the head with that. But he's wrong in his aesthetic judgments. He's wrong, as Greenberg might have put it, in his taste. Now that's not to say that Timothy Don has bad taste. I know the man and I can tell you that his taste is impeccable. The more important point is that he thinks there is taste at all, which is why, after a great reflection on why he began to appreciate Basquiat despite himself, he still feels he has to draw the line at Jeff Koons. But there is no such line. The Greenbergian moment is over. It's over. The Kantian argument lost. All there are now are many things and the struggle is to figure out what they are and why they are interesting. And because of that fact there is no reason to be so hard on our little friends like Mr. Koons. Mr. Koons was trying to liberate us from our Greenbergian fetors.
We must learn to love Jeff Koons.
Indeed, I would say that the thing that was first being called postmodernism a couple of decades ago is only really coming into its own now. Partly that's because it isn't so 'post' anymore, its just the way we apprehend the world. More and more, it is simply natural. You could call this a new naturalism, though it’s a naturalism so thoroughly interfused with the artificial that the distinction just isn't interesting anymore. And this allows for a new immediacy, a new sincerity.
In an elegant little essay by Douglas Coupland of Generation X fame, something of this same point is made about Jeff Koons. One of the things that probably infuriated people so much about Koons was the way that he came off as such the glib ironist. It seemed like he was sneering at everyone and everything even as he made a killing off the 80s art boom.
But Coupland suggests that that really wasn't Koons' attitude at all.
To watch Koons speak in interviews, he is always maddeningly espousing warm, gooey, puppy love for his creations - and he answers every pointed question with the same beatific smile, like the Pope playing poker. While the work can sometimes appear dazzlingly, shamelessly shallow, he himself tells us that it possesses untold hidden depths - the polar opposite of Warhol. Koons' work is detached yet also sentimental. Or... is it? He has never, as far as one can tell, presented any evidence of ironic detachment from his source material and its spawn. Which means that he is either a very cool cucumber - cooler than Warhol - or he's the Rain Man of the art scene. Is his work deep? Is it shallow? Is he for real? Is he a shaman? Is he an idiot savant?
When he made his stupid giant puppies and his annoying little porcelains he loved them, he thought they were important and meaningful. And he was confused by the rancor directed his way. "My puppy is so beautiful," he was saying. "Why don't you love my puppy?" But we didn't listen. We were so smart. There was no way we were going to fall in love with his dumb fucking puppy. 
The fact is he was right. He was teaching us how to live aesthetically in this world, sort of like Warhol tried to do before him but one step further along. If you can love the puppy you've achieved a certain kind of freedom. You've achieved a new level of sensibility adequate to a situation of absolute aesthetic pluralism (Arthur Danto). Now that makes certain kinds of distinctions impossible, it ruins the capacity for taste in the way Greenberg meant it, but it's immensely liberating as well because it puts you right back squarely in this world, the one we're actually inhabiting now. It allows a hell of a lot of the things that are out there to become beautiful again. Beautiful not as the authentic object with its aura from times past. Beautiful in a new way. Beautiful like a porcelain figurine of Michael Jackson and his frickin monkey. If you can love that little figurine, really love it, no pretending, than you're going to be OK. You're going to be better than OK. You're going to be in love with the world again because an almost infinite array of potential aesthetic pleasure is going to open up to you. 
Now those of you out there committed to criticism in its more robust sense, to Greenbergian attitudes or others, are having a hard time here. You're disgusted maybe. But I don't think you should be. Because the most liberating aspect of Koons' work is that it just doesn't impose an aesthetic criterion beyond itself. One can still like abstract expressionism and the fact is such things are still being produced. In a way, Gerhard Richter is a version of Jeff Koons. He also realized that there is little reason in the aesthetic world of the present to confine yourself to any one trajectory of taste or to this or that aesthetic criterion. Richter was just a lot more uptight about than Koons. And hey, that's OK if you still want to be uptight about art. There's lots of uptight art out there for you.
But if you're willing to give it a go, Koons can be interesting therapy. Clement Greenberg was talking about Donald Judd one day and he said, roughly, 'these boxes are OK, but they just don't have the right proportions. If they were more interesting as boxes they would be better'. Now that's a man, God love him, who is unwilling or unable (or both) to allow the possibility of another criterion. Judd wasn't thinking about his boxes that way. And Jeff Koons' Puppies are not meant to be looked at as Judd's boxes are. According to Koons, his puppies are meant to be a symbol of 'love, warmth, and happiness'. I don't know, I think that I'm prepared to believe that they are symbols of exactly that. In a funny way, it took a lot of balls to make cuddly art. You have to tip your hat to the man, the little bear has a button in its hand that says 'I Love You'. Damn.
Here's a last shot. Coupland puts it this way and I find the comment persuasive. Enjoy.
Most older artists have chosen to opt out of the ironic/post-ironic discourse ('Let the damn kids figure it out'), but for the young, the irony/post-irony discourse is as common as oxygen, and to ignore it is to will irrelevance onto oneself. But the consensus seems to be mounting in both the art and
literary worlds that, in order to jump dimensions, one has to play with all polarities of irony: heartfelt confession morphing into old sitcom punchlines morphing into Serzone blankness. In other words, being Jeff Koons.
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If you define criticism as a defense of one's own taste, I think you have made a good case for Koons here, although it's my understanding that most of Koons' supporters don't take his statements at face value nearly as much as you do. This is also a good reformulation of the late-pomo aesthetic attitudes of 1990s America when Koons prevailed, even though the work and that zeitgeist somehow seems dated now, at least to me, as "over" as the other earlier moments you are criticizing as naive.
You also say:
"The more important point is that he [Timothy Don] thinks there is taste at all, which is why, after a great reflection on why he began to appreciate Basquiat despite himself, he still feels he has to draw the line at Jeff Koons. But there is no such line. The Greenbergian moment is over. It's over. The Kantian argument lost."
Here I think you might be overreaching, because taste does not require Kantean or Greenbergian trascendental or quasi-eternal or universal bases to operate. It is easy to draw a line wherever one prefers without needing close air support from Kant or Greenberg and people have been doing it for some decades, since God and the Author and all that other stuff Died. If Taste died, it came back to life immediately as Zombie Taste, Undead Taste - but more likely it never died at all despite everybody's best efforts. I like lime sorbet. I was wrong before when I said I didn't, or I changed my mind, or my tastes changed. Taste might simply be an extended form of preference, a personal reality or a social reality in one of Stanley Fish's "Interpretive Communities." Or, as Duke Ellington said, "There's the good stuff and then there's the other stuff." We all feel we know what this means even though we might disagree on what is what. Taste is inevitable. Taste happens. "Passionate and partial" was Baudelaire's way of putting things.
Posted by: J. M. Tyree | Jul 4, 2005 5:21:38 AM
A most compelling post, sir, and I am honored to have inspired it. I thank you. Your thoughts deserve more than I can put together here, so please take the following as preliminary to a more sustained and, I hope, ongoing discussion.
J. M. Tyree had precisely the initial reaction I had to your opening comments: if criticism is a defense of one’s own taste, you have made a case for Koons. You have also made a case for LeRoy Neiman, Erté, and the multitude of “fine artists” whose wares ooze like a bucket of spilled drool from the gutters of the Art District Formerly Known as SOHO into every strip mall in America. The only thing that separates these wares from the porcelain figurines that Koons produces is the price tag attached to them. According to your criteria, which I have described elsewhere and with great affection as “honey pot postmodernism,” Brittany Spears is an artist. Bill Cosby is an artist. Raven Simone is an artist. Tom Cruise is an artist. Every jackass with an agent and a studio is an artist. Success, fame, wealth, bigness, overstatement, exaggeration of the aura of consumer objects, a single-minded devotion to gloss and glitz: these are the hallmarks of art in this post-taste age of yours. Now, I am not interested in locking the doors to the house of art. But the wonderful, liberating fact that they have been thrown open since Duchamp and Dada means we need to be more discerning, we need to exercise more judgment, not less, if we choose to take up residence therein. If democracies are to thrive, rather than merely spawn, they require informed citizens. Otherwise one ends up with a shrub in the White House. Likewise with the house of art. “All there are now,” you write, “are many things and the struggle is to figure out what they are and why they are interesting.” But not everything is interesting and many, too many, things are banal. The game is not always worth the candle. When the hip and the young want to praise themselves or demonstrate their sophistication, they describe themselves as “nonjudgmental.” “Oh, I’m a very nonjudgmental person,” they say, “I like all of it” (and this usually just before they lay into Christians, or the bourgeoisie, or Clinton, or Conservatives with an appetite they might otherwise reserve for their delicious tofurkey sandwiches.) The apogee of five thousand years of civilization (in the occident) is the disappearance of the very faculty that made civilization possible? As Snoop (who most definitely is an artist) might say, nigga please.
I think I could deal with Koons if he actually were being ironic, rather than sincere, as you say he is; if his work tried to be grotesque rather than cuddly, warm and gooey. (His puppies say as much to me about love as a Chia Pet does—which is exactly what his Flower Puppy from a few years ago in Rockefeller Center looked like: an enormous, overgrown Chia Pet. Oh well: at least it was an organic object.) If you are right to say that Koons is being sincere (and I think you are), then Koons is profoundly different from Warhol. Warhol held up a mirror to ArtWorld and showed us that the mythos that sustained it, the mythos of Romanticism and the Romantic Genius, is finally, fully over. We are rudderless after Warhol, and all we have to guide us henceforth are icons of culture, secular saints—Marilyn, Mao, Jackie O. —that glitter like cold and lonely stars above our heads. There are no geniuses after Warhol; the artist is nothing after Warhol, or she is nothing more than a cipher, a reflective surface, a sounding board. Warhol is the Nietzsche of art, proclaiming the death of the artist. He cleared a space that we have ever since tried, desperately, to fill. Koons’ ongoing contribution to that space is an attempt to cute us to death with puppies and teddy bears and Michael Jackson and monkeys. Vacuum cleaners in highly lit Plexiglas cases. Kitsch statuary cast in stainless steel. Blown glass of he and Cicciolina having sex. “When somebody sees my work,” Koons once said, “the only thing that they see is the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Exsqueeze me? Compared to Warhol, he is worth about as much as a bad fart on a crowded train.
Now, your comments regarding the need to achieve “a new level of sensibility adequate to a situation of absolute aesthetic pluralism,” and how this serves the deeper purpose of putting us “right back squarely in this world, the one we're actually inhabiting now,” are brilliant and wonderful, and you know that I agree with you there. Yes! Look around you! Notice the world! Isn’t it strange, beautiful, terrible, tragic? But Koons doesn’t do that for me (which doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t do it for anyone), and here’s why: when I look closely at the world, I discover not that the authentic object with its aura has disappeared, but that it thrives in many places and in places we never expected it to, like a wildflower growing in an ice cave; and, more importantly, that it (the authentic, the aura) can be neither ignored nor manufactured. It’s like good writing: you know it when you see it, and it can’t be faked. Maybe the aura in art has disappeared for you, and this is why your aesthetic landscape has flattened, to a certain extent (which is not an insult or a diagnosis, just a description). But “absolute aesthetic pluralism” does not mean absolute aesthetic relativity. Some art objects are better than others; and my suspicion is that what distinguishes them is some quality—an art quotient, if you will—that remains proportional to their aura, which in turn arises from the talent, intelligence, creativity and dumb luck that the artist and the viewer bring to the work. There is not a single artist out there whose goal is to make work that cannot be distinguished from any other piece of work. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were very obviously not Brillo Boxes. That was (part of) the whole point.
When Robert Hughes (in many ways, the Clement Greenberg of our time) visited Koons in his studio as part of the documentary being made from Hughes’ book American Visions, he was treated to a personal tour of the facility from which Koons’ visual gibberish spills. Koons’ assistants were scrambling around like monkeys, covered in paint and dirt, very busily… making Koons’ art for him! Hughes stood there for a few moments studying the scene while Koons stood beside him with his beatific smile. I think he even brushed a bit of porcelain dust from his immaculate linen suit. Hughes turned to him. “So what you’re saying here,” he spoke very slowly, as though trying to elucidate a difficult point, “is that you don’t actually touch any of the works you produce.” I thought I saw, very briefly, a crack in Koons’ exterior. “Well, in a technical sense, no, I don’t,” he said. “I see,” Hughes said; then they both studied the workers around them at work. The interview was over. So are the 1980s. So is Koons.
Posted by: timothy don | Jul 5, 2005 1:32:27 PM
First To Tyree's thoughtful comments.
I don't define criticism as a defense of one's own taste. I define it, now, these days, as an attempt to say things about art without appealing to the concept of taste at all. The challenge of art right now, I think, is that every work, in a sense, contains its own criterion. The work of the 'critic' would be to talk about that. There is no standard of taste anymore that can make a claim across all possible forms. So the concept of taste itself is pretty useless except as a shorthand for 'what I like'. But I don't think it's very interesting for critics to say 'I like this' or 'I like that' or the reverse. So there's a different goal and that is to say 'here's what this is doing' or 'here's how this work fits into the world'. And then you can say, 'this work sets up a criterion and is amazing' or 'this work sets up a criterion and then fails'. But that is different than an appeal to taste either in the subjective Baudelairean sense or the objective Greenbergian one.
Finally, what you say about taste 'just happening' is very similar to what Greenberg says about taste. He says that you can't help making judgments about art. They are automatic. And this comes from one's basic faculty for taste. But he makes a further step. He claims that, over time, agreement in taste shows that there is some objective ground for taste in general. And this is how we know, without being able to prove it, that our aesthetic judgments are grounded in something more universal. Now, I think you're in a tough spot if you want to talk about taste in any meaningful way without accepting something in Greenberg's logic. Cause then you're essentially saying that taste is simply my own personal momentary whim based on nothing and unanalyzable. My suggestion, relying heavily on Danto, is to dump the language altogether and start doing something else.
Also, as an aside, I don't think that the past moments that are over were naive. They were great. They were adequate to their own moment. But not to ours, at least as world views.
And I don't think Koons is that dated because I think we're only getting to the point now where the trajectory he was plotting seems natural and obvious. It took a while to really start being Jeff Koons. That isn't to say that we'll make art that looks or feels like Koons' art. We'll make all kinds of different things. But we'll have internalized the Koons realization about things just as people slowly internalized the Warholian one.
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 5, 2005 7:49:40 PM
Ironically, I post this response to the recent excellent discussion by Mr. Don and Mr. Meis from art school, where I am days from receiving my MFA. I think Timothy would be in his element here, where just about everyone would be ready to agree that Snoop Dogg is an artist but heaven forfend not Britney and that commercials are different than films and that optimism is not an aesthetic criterion. Except…except that many have a hard time explaining why commercials they like and share with friends are not art, or why Snoop Dogg is indubitably an artist—even though, as a commercial pop entity, calling him an artist 25 years ago would have been laughable—and why they just don’t feel all that pessimistic even though they still think they ought to. Something is in the air, Timmy, I dare say you feel the breeze in your knickers too, and it may well just be Jeff Koons.
After all, what kind of Timothy would disagree with this:
“I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the world a better place (this is not a cliche!).”
Or this:
“The soul of the object must be maintained to have confidence in the arena.”
Or:
“It's basically the medium that defines people's perceptions of the world, of life itself, how to interact with others. The media defines reality. Just yesterday we met some friends. We were celebrating and I stated to them: "Here's to good friends!" It was like living in an ad. It was wonderful, a wonderful moment. We were right there living in the reality of our media.”
Okay, not that one. I threw that one in for Morgan.
I have many things to add to this conversation and hope to be a continuing presence in this conversation. I promise soon, however, an actual work that responds better than anything I could write at this point. While I am not seriously saying that Timothy is a neo-sincerist despite himself, and while I am also completely compelled by the argument that Koons is an early neo-sincerist, what I can’t quite get my head around is the sense that there is something of the sublime that Koons is trying to achieve with all this super-okay-ness and what that means for neo-sincerity.
An eyestorm.com article puts it well, in talking about his piece 'Equilibrium Tanks': “Koons has referred to these tanks as 'the ultimate state of being', and these hovering basketballs do suggest a kind of epiphany of consumerism, if there is such a thing. Koons' utilization of the most hi-tech display techniques (he worked with over 50 physicists, including Nobel Prize-winning Richard Feynman, to produce the 'Equilibrium Tanks'), coupled with his use of highly skilled, traditional Italian craftsmen, lifts the everyday consumer product into the realm of the spiritual.”
And this:
“There is a profound faith in human desire and agency at the core of Koons' work: a utilitarian belief that everything we want and do is based on a drive for sensual pleasure that transcends the pursuit of mere sex, work, or money.”
Perhaps Timothy and Mr. Koons can share something in common after all.
Posted by: Stefany Anne Golberg | Jul 6, 2005 1:39:35 AM
I am enjoying this discussion, deeply so; it’s a pity that it’s taking place off the charts. Ah well—fame is not the point.
The thing that separates Brittney from Snoop is, indeed, hard to name. You can take that to mean that the difference doesn’t exist (a kind of negative legislation to which I think you would not subscribe: “If you can’t name it, it’s not there!”), or you can simply take it to mean that something is there that one recognizes with a faculty that is counter-linguistic or supra-linguistic or something along those lines. Music is actually a very good means to access this problem because it does seem to work on the listener as an art form that is qualitatively different, in its immediacy, from the ways that books work on the reader or visual art works on the viewer. (Although I would maintain that “good writing” is similar in that it is immediately grasped and it cannot be faked.) In any case, here’s an attempt. Britney’s “music,” in my opinion, lacks a complexity and a depth and a discursive value that Snoop’s has. Her rhymes are to Snoop’s what Flavia’s poetry is to Rilke’s. She is a greeting card; he is a poet. Her melodies are recycled. Her entire ouvre is a cliché. She is a parody of herself. The effect she achieves is neither conceptual nor emotional, it is sentimental; and it works by preying upon adolescent sentiments. It is utterly without humor. She is not creating anything--not even herself. She is a pretty puppet. The best thing I can say about her is that she is a very capable businesswoman, but if we’re going to build rooms in the house of art for businesspeople then the category becomes so wide as to be almost meaningless. You’re a musician, a composer--and a damned fine one at that. Would you actually listen to Britney’s music? And I mean listen to it, not use it to provoke a discussion or tighten a critique or as an ironic gesture, but do that thing that one does with music? Listen to it?
Where commercials are concerned, versus films, I think one can say that certain commercials borrow a great deal from art but this doesn’t make them art—it just makes them good commercials. They differ from art in their intent, in the role they play and the position they occupy in society, and I think this is an important difference. I’m not really trying to carve out a privileged place for art—I’m just saying that art is not that important, not everything has to be called Art! in order to gain legitimacy, even if it exhibits artistry (craftsmanship, intelligence, humor, touch)—but the fact that entertainers and designers are so eager to be Taken Seriously as Artists might seem to suggest that they themselves are aware that there is a difference between what they are being paid to do and what they wished they did. These claims say more about the people making them, their insecurities and needs, than they do about the thing (art) to which they are laying claim.
Now, you seem to think I would agree with the following:
“I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the world a better place (this is not a cliche!).”
Why you would think I might possibly agree with that is beyond me. I find it repugnant. IF a work of art makes the world a better place, then that’s great—but in my opinion it has no “responsibility” to do so. The fact that great work does usually make the world a better place does not mean all art has a responsibility to do the same, because great work makes the world a better place not by changing it but by making manifest the good that is already present.
This,:
“The soul of the object must be maintained to have confidence in the arena.”
I cannot fathom. What does it mean? It sounds to me like the statement either of an artist trying to defend the ludicrously high price tag she attaches to her work or of a restorer apologizing for stripping the patina of age and dust and decay from a painting. Is this what the pope said after the Sistine Chapel was returned to us as a piece of early Mannerism? If an object has a soul, it doesn’t need to be maintained.
If Koons is an early neo-sincerist than I am afraid your movement appeared at the hour when the sun casts its shortest shadow. You need to remember that art is not ahistorical; and the 80s, when Koons was cranked out by the Manhattan mechanism, were a decade when the market and art were finally synthesized and ArtWorld boomed. Koons, you may or may not know, was a commodities trader before he was an artist. Odd coincidence, don’t ya think? If you want to argue that all signs are autonomous and refer only to one another, that authenticity is a canard, that no image is “truer” or “deeper” than the next, and that the radicality of an object can be saved from corruption as merchandise only by becoming absurdly expensive, a la Baudrillard (a cult figure in ArtWorld), then I’m afraid the joke is on you. Nothing is more delicious to advanced “taste” than an enhanced sense of its own tolerance, and Koons’ genius lay in convincing collectors that the syrupy, gross, unctuous and utterly numbing work he produced was actually “challenging.” An “epiphany of consumerism”? The sublimity of the consumer object? I think not, and I wouldn’t want it anyway. You and Koons can keep that world for yourselves.
Posted by: timothy don | Jul 6, 2005 12:09:03 PM
I, too, am enjoying this discussion. "It's All Good", or "absolute aesthetic pluralism," works for me more than it does for Timothy, but I'm not satisfied with it - mainly the "absolute" part. Also, I think it would be horrible if Timothy changed his mind if it meant no more Negotiations. I don't have a problem with Koons. I like Koons. Koons is fine by me. I think that Koons is playing out some of the ideas of Warhol, he's a subset of Warholism. (Including, by the way, the cheerful goofy attitude of naive or faux-naive happiness of Warhol's Autobiography that was popular in the 80s and 90s amongst artists.) My only criticism of Koons would be that. Which isn't a criticism of his work but of his greatness vis-a-vis Warhol. Furthermore, I strongly and probably irrevocably disagree that Koons' world is our own - the Mid-Zeros are a much more troubling and screwed up and tragic and sad old world, an ancient world, not a new world, in my opinion. Everything is not OK, and, therefore, I would argue, Koons is not the artist for our time any more than Bill Clinton is the politician of our time. So I'll dispute with you there.
Pluralism is a key concept in contemporary art criticism because there are no more overarching trends or succeeding schools supposedly reaching toward the absolute. But it shouldn't and needn't be a denial of taste, which I simply don't define as needing a universal basis to have value. Since I don't believe that one really has to choose between a momentary whim and an objective truth, I don't feel the need to dump the language of taste after its pretensions to universality have been shattered. There are other alternatives. I don't find this a tough spot at all. This is the human condition in our day. I just don't take Greenberg very seriously, I'm afraid. Here I am with Timothy - fight for what you believe, and enjoy being wrong, but don't efface your great loves and hates. Make it more personal, not less so.
I have no problem having opinions and grading my tastes - no one, thankfully, can stop me from differentiating things I like more and less. And, I would argue, nobody ever stops doing this stuff anyway, so that to try to avoid it may be insincere. I don't feel the need to force people to like lime sorbet or Warhol even though I would like to explain why I like both at length, and why I like lime sorbet more than I like ice cream. I don't really expect everyone to agree with me - indeed, most won't on the matter of the sorbet, and I have made my peace with the global triumph of ice cream. When I rail against ice cream, as I often do, I know that I am being silly and not trying to sway anybody except fellow sorbetists, and I am certainly not deliberately being hurtful to cows or the shareholders of Haagen-Daz. What makes me uncomfortable, however, is the idea of someone trying tell me that I am WRONG to prefer lime sorbet or to like ice cream less. This is not a moment's whim, but a very well thought-out position on sorbet that has taken me years of research and which gives me a great amount of pleasure to know.
Posted by: J. M. Tyree | Jul 7, 2005 1:27:28 AM
I do not fully understand your relationship to lime sorbet, but all the same I often wish I could be as clear-headed, thought-provoking, and helpful as you are when I write, Mr. Tyree. I salute you, and I agree with pretty much everything you say. My only question is, why, if Koons is so good (Morgan, Stefany), will the most important exhibit you (You! There! Specific, living people!) see this year be the Robert Smithson Retrospective at the Whitney? A man who makes work that confronts the absolute and the undeniable, and in so doing makes present the absolute and the undeniable?
Posted by: timothy don | Jul 7, 2005 2:15:57 AM
The worry about Brittney Spears strikes me as a false worry. Nobody is really proposing Brittney as an artist so who cares. And she doesn't put herself forward that way. The idea that now, anything can be a work of art doesn't mean that everything is. I don't think we need to be too concerned about the collapse of all standards or any of these things that conservatives normally get all worked up about. (The ad for Brittney's new perfume is pretty hot though, check it out.)
And let me clarify my point about Koons again. I think Koons is important both on a 'meta' level and on an individual level (though the two have some connections). He's important on a 'meta' level because he signals a further step in the Warholian process by which art expands its possibilites and gives up on the Modernist dream of The One True Art. The further step is interesting to me because Koons goes somewhere different than the kind of ironic detachment that you still see in Warhol. This was why I quoted the Coupland piece where he talks about Koons as a kind of post-ironist. The exhuberance by which Koons leapt into that role made him notable and it influenced many of the artists and styles that are coming out of contemporary art today, and much of it is very good and interesting work indeed.
On another level I think a lot of Koons' actual work is great. It's not great if you look at it with Smithson in mind. And I think Smithson is a great artist. But nothing in Smithson prevents me from liking things in Koons or vice versa. The criterion for looking at Smithson isn't one that applies to Koons, which is another sign that there is simply no standard of taste that meaningfully makes claims across all of art.
But calling Koons' art basically non-art, denigrating it because he doesn't specifically handle and create it like the manly artists of yore, and saying that it is, essentially, a joke, strikes me as similar to the way that conservatives have always moved to block the emergence of new things in art.
Here's something that the poet Wilfred Blunt wrote about a show in the early part of the twentieth century. (I get this from Danto). He said it was "an extrememly bad joke or a swindle." He was talking about an exhibit of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso.
Now, you can like or dislike Koons, and you can find the implications of his consumer celebrations disturbing, but if you mobilize that kind of language (the 'this is a joke', 'it's not real', 'it's a fraud' 'not real art' language) then I think you are missing an important aspect of what's happened in art and criticism in the last forty years or so, which is that no such boundaries are being recognized.
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 7, 2005 11:37:41 AM
A good wrap-up on your part, which I appreciate. A few notes remain, however:
1. The discussion of Brittney is a false worry indeed, but I was asked by someone with arched eyebrows to explain why Brittney isn’t an artist, so I took a crack at it. (I’d still be interested to hear Stefany’s answers to my questions—that is, to elide for me the difference between film (art) and commercials, between Brittany and Snoop, etc.) Seems to me that there are discussions going on at Bard, at least, that inquire into the art quotient of Brittney.
2. To say that Koons is important is a different thing than to say his work is great. (And I thought that all such judgments were off-limits for you? No good, no bad, no taste, just a multiplicity of interesting things to appreciate. In your own words: “All there are now are many things and the struggle is to figure out what they are and why they are interesting.”) I think his work is important. I don’t think it’s great.
3. The notion that the only criterion by which to judge a specific piece of art is the criterion that the work itself holds out is a not too unattractive notion and it is one with which I am familiar and that I have used in my own work. (It also has an implicit “taste value” built-in, even though you refuse to recognize it. In that sense it is somewhat self-vitiating.) But you are asking it to do too much heavy lifting, in my opinion. Some art holds out a criterion or criteria that might be poor criteria. A lot of political/identity art does that. Because I find its criteria lacking, I not surprisingly find its artistic merit lacking, even if it lives up to its own criteria. I think Jeff Koons’ work has the same problem, and more. I think it actually fails in places, according to its own criteria. I don’t look at his work and see the sacred heart of Jesus beating there. I don’t experience an epiphany of consumerism. I don’t see the everyday consumer object lifted into the realm of the spiritual. I don’t see a “profound faith in human agency and desire at the heart of his work.” His artifice doesn’t work. I am not taken in. I look forward to reading Danto’s chapter on Koons this evening, because I generally like what he says. But Danto is a very sweet man. He is very patient. He “likes” pretty much everything. He also (incidentally) argues that the Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence is to be taken not as a thought-experiment, but literally.
4. You’re right that it’s a cheap shot to take at Koons about his not handling his own art. But it was said partly as a joke and partly as a small coda to a larger critique of his work and the ideas and philosophy of consumerism that animate it and the artmarket to which it was released that you may have missed.
I think, however, that to say that because I think Koons’ work stinks I am conservative in the tradition of Wilfred Blunt, missing the Cezannes, van Goghs, Matisses and Picassos of my day, is silly. It would be like saying that your logic for critique/appreciation of art is ultimately the logic of a solipsist because for you there is nothing outside the work that can be brought to the work in order to judge it, only the logic and the criteria of the work exist—as though any of us could ever enter a work so fully…
Posted by: timothy Don | Jul 7, 2005 4:45:06 PM
A good wrap-up on your part, which I appreciate. A few notes remain, however:
1. The discussion of Brittney is a false worry indeed, but I was asked by someone with arched eyebrows to explain why Brittney isn’t an artist, so I took a crack at it. (I’d still be interested to hear Stefany’s answers to my questions—that is, to elide for me the difference between film (art) and commercials, between Brittany and Snoop, etc.) Seems to me that there are discussions going on at Bard, at least, that inquire into the art quotient of Brittney.
2. To say that Koons is important is a different thing than to say his work is great. (And I thought that all such judgments were off-limits for you? No good, no bad, no taste, just a multiplicity of interesting things to appreciate. In your own words: “All there are now are many things and the struggle is to figure out what they are and why they are interesting.”) I think his work is important. I don’t think it’s great.
3. The notion that the only criterion by which to judge a specific piece of art is the criterion that the work itself holds out is a not too unattractive notion and it is one with which I am familiar and that I have used in my own work. (It also has an implicit “taste value” built-in, even though you refuse to recognize it. In that sense it is somewhat self-vitiating.) But you are asking it to do too much heavy lifting, in my opinion. Some art holds out a criterion or criteria that might be poor criteria. A lot of political/identity art does that. Because I find its criteria lacking, I not surprisingly find its artistic merit lacking, even if it lives up to its own criteria. I think Jeff Koons’ work has the same problem, and more. I think it actually fails in places, according to its own criteria. I don’t look at his work and see the sacred heart of Jesus beating there. I don’t experience an epiphany of consumerism. I don’t see the everyday consumer object lifted into the realm of the spiritual. I don’t see a “profound faith in human agency and desire at the heart of his work.” His artifice doesn’t work. I am not taken in. I look forward to reading Danto’s chapter on Koons this evening, because I generally like what he says. But Danto is a very sweet man. He is very patient. He “likes” pretty much everything. He also (incidentally) argues that the Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence is to be taken not as a thought-experiment, but literally.
4. You’re right that it’s a cheap shot to take at Koons about his not handling his own art. But it was said partly as a joke and partly as a small coda to a larger critique of his work and the ideas and philosophy of consumerism that animate it and the artmarket to which it was released that you may have missed.
I think, however, that to say that because I think Koons’ work stinks I am conservative in the tradition of Wilfred Blunt, missing the Cezannes, van Goghs, Matisses and Picassos of my day, is silly. It would be like saying that your logic for critique/appreciation of art is ultimately the logic of a solipsist because for you there is nothing outside the work that can be brought to the work in order to judge it, only the logic and the criteria of the work exist—as though any of us could ever enter a work so fully…
Posted by: timothy Don | Jul 7, 2005 4:46:25 PM
"Busines art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called 'art' or whatever it's called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art."
From The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975.
Posted by: J. M. Tyree | Jul 8, 2005 12:25:44 AM
By the way, I did read Danto's chapter on Koons last night and several others from his new book (Unnatural Wonders). There's a problem in Danto and it's a problem I've had with him for a long time, as much as I like his work and am very glad he's doing it and as much as I've learned from it. The problem is that he believes his role as a critic is to explain to viewers why a particular piece is interesting. The problem reaches rather amusing proportions in the chapter on Koons, because he goes from adopting Koons' criteria (you don't need High Art Criticism to explain Art to you. you know what you like and what you like are puppies and bunnies—the very things you saw and were fascinated by in your grandmother's house when you were a boy (chatchka's, bunnies, porcelain figurines)—and I will give you puppies and bunnies. I will cater to your desires. Don't be ashamed of them)—danto goes in that chapter from "explaining" this philosophy to adopting it. He actually, incredibly, claims that Koons is right, that deep down inside we all love puppies and bunnies like we did when we were children. This is very strange to me, coming from someone who is as sophisticated as danto is, because he seems to think that we are nothing more than narcissists, finally, that people don't or can't change, that "consciousness" is not a phenomenon that actually occurs and changes the way we actually see things. Does he really think that all we ever want are the things we had/lost when we were children? Yikes. Infantilization writ large. That's creepy.
If Koons is right, that We Know What We Like and we don't need High Art Critics to explain difficult art and shape our tastes for us, then what is Danto performing, other than an elaborate shell game, "explaining Koons," reintegrating his work into the High Art Scam by claiming that it exposes that very scam, and in so doing reestablishing the Scam and criticism as its broker—not necessarily of taste, that would be much too pedestrian, but now of ideas? And what precisely is the difference between Kant saying "This object is beautiful, and if you have any taste you too will find it beautiful" and Danto saying "This object, this material expression of an idea, is interesting and I will explain to you why it is interesting and once you 'get' my refinied conceptual apparatus, you too will find it interesting?"
Posted by: timothy Don | Jul 8, 2005 2:37:54 PM
Because I have been traveling I have not been able to contribute to this interesting discussion. I have a few thoughts. It seems to me that a Danto like pluralism has to deal above all else with the thought of Stanley Cavell. For Cavell modernist art (which includes any art after Manet let's say, corresponding to Hegel's art after the end of art) is art that is made under the suspicion of being false or fake insofar as the evaluative norms by which something establishes itself as art, much less as good art, have broken down. Cavell’s category thus encompasses both modernist and postmodernist art. Cavell’s point is that this situation does not obviate criticism but changes its function. Now we don't bring norms to art from the outside but attempt to give an account of how an artwork shows itself to not be false or fake, to be art. However, an artwork does not establish itself as an ‘authentic’ work of art by living up to pre-established norms, but by establishing itself as a true work of art through its own inner integrity or seriousness. Here an artwork achieves the universal through the particular. However, great art establishes or institutes this universal, it does not mimetically copy it. As such, art becomes a means by which meaning is introduced into the universe, a meaning that cannot be reduced simply to the projections of individual subjects. Great art achieves this state of meaning making, while good criticism brings out the logic of this achievement. The reason why the pluralist has to deal with Cavell is that he grants pluralism’s premise: namely that criticism enters into radical self-questioning just as and when art does. However he does not take this to mean the end of criticism but the beginning of its attempt to establish judgment in the absence of a pre-established norm (which is exactly what reflective judgment is for Kant).
For a full scale pluralism to be attractive one has to buy into a bogus either /or: either there is a pre-established mechanism by which we can establish better or worse or we cannot judge at all. For the vulgar pluralist, because clearly there is no pre-established mechanism, all there can be is either subjectivism or what I would call a material phenomenology of the present. A material phenomenology of the present tries to disclose the material categories of experience implicit in the various items of our culture. From this latter point of view (one that emerges from a highly particular reading of the latter Benjamin) cultural criticism can only be an analysis of the cultural items which embody these categories. However, because our goal can only be an understanding of the cultural present, there is no place for critique in the sense of establishing an order of better or worse. All we are interested in is how all the items of our culture disclose the material categories of present experience. For Morgan criticism (in the sense of establishing better or worse) is over because cultural analysis can only be this type of material phenomenology. All we can do is accept the aesthetic given and learn to enjoy ourselves. The problem with this view is two-fold: 1) the either/or which makes it plausible is on closer inspection not tenable, 2) it does not recognize that the material categories of experience are already informed by norms. Because these categories already imbibe norms (for that is what a category is, a norm which governs a transition from one material content to another), we do not need a pre-established mechanism to determine an order of rank, we already have the means to establish one. It is important to emphasize again that this only gives us the means to establish this order. We can ‘choose’ not establish it, perhaps by accepting a highly integrated tradition or by lack of interest. Morgan recognizes that aspect of normativity but does not seem to realize that it ramifies against his position. As they say, behind every postmodernist one will find a disappointed Platonists.
Posted by: Steven Levine | Jul 9, 2005 12:14:36 AM
This could go on forever, which, I guess, wouldn't be such a bad thing at all.
First, to Timothy and the four points.
1) OK
2) I'm saying it is important AND great and definitely art. If you accept that it is important and that it's art than we can dispense with the more intense Grenneberg side of the debate. The next question is whether it is good art, and there is certainly nothing that prevents one in my version of 'criticism' from saying something is good or bad. Honestly, I'm less interested in the kind of criticism that explains why things are bad than in trying to find what might make something good, but that is just a matter of personal style most likely. Either way, if you accept the move of a more immanent criticism, you can still say that such and such work, even by its own criteria, isn't good or succesfull or whatever else.
But I think, as per your next post about what creeps you out in Koons, that your sneaking in a sense about what is authentic or inauthentic in the world when you talk about Koons' work as art or not 'really' art and there I think you should be more precise. For instance, you could say that Koons embodies, perhaps perfectly captures, a certain mood of complete surrender to consumer culture. At the same time, he does it with a wit and cleverness that makes that surrender all the more maddening. Now, I don't know if anyone has done that more brilliantly than Koons, and that makes him great. His works are amazing, audacious, ridiculous, hilarious, sometimes even ,I dare say it, beautiful even as they are a peon to surface and a kind of ultimate dumbness. Now, to achieve that strikes me as great.
Your point is that you find such a surrendering to consumer culture to be wretched and sad. Fair enough. Koons is thus, in your eyes, a kind of idiot savante in the service of what is worst and least inspiring about contemporary life.
Now, if that is indeed your point I can accept that because you are no longer making a point about what art has to be and do, formally and materially, in order to be 'real'. The little nominalist policeman inside me can simmer down. We can both say that Koons exemplified something so well as to be great, and you can say that thing is stupid while I can say it is just fine. Because, in the end, consumer culture doesn't bother me as much as it does you. I think it's great too. Everything is lovely as long as you make it so. I'm going to go to the mall now.
3) I don't think that there is any such thing as a poor criterion. That is to put the cart before the horse. Criteria make judgments possible, not the other way around. I think lots of works in identity politic art and stuff like that are just marvelous, wonderful. I love it! It's only when such artists and critics try and throw their oughts around and talk about what art per se SHOULD be that I become bored and go play XBox.
4) You're right. I wasn't really accusing you of being that kind of conservative. I was just making the point. But you're right.
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 9, 2005 3:47:34 PM
Now to Timothy's next post about what Danto is really up to.
And I must say, you're pretty much on target with stuff there. That IS what criticism does now. You seem to find that dissatisfying. I don't. I think that's not only a perfectly fine place to be but also happens to be, factually speaking, about the only place criticism really CAN be if it is honest to itself about where art is and what's going on in the world.
And Danto isn't saying that ALL we care about are bunnies and stuff from childhood, he's saying that that is ONE OF THE THINGS we actually do care about and Koons satisfies that in us. Indeed, you're perfectly right in a way, Koons is the ultimate infantilizer. AND THAT IS GREAT. Fucking amazing really. But the point is that Koons gives us a taste of that childhood immediacy for those who perfectly realize that the world is more than that and we're all cynical adults. I LOVE THAT. I really do. I think it's what makes Koons a genius. A GENIUS. OK, well at least pretty smart. And that's why Koons is an early neo-sinceritist, its immediacy for those who've read the Phenomenology of Spirit, immediacy for the knowing, immediacy as an achievment and a choice, non-naive immediacy, unpure immediacy. Koons may be an infantilizer but he's not going to infantalize anyone. I'm an open Koons admirer and I still read big books and shit. I can talk smart. But I want to cuddle sometimes dammit and I WANT MY WOOBIE.
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 9, 2005 4:01:17 PM
Timothy, you're a very smart man and I love you for that. I'd buy you a big fluffy Koons cuddly bear if I could afford it.
When you say:
"And what precisely is the difference between Kant saying "This object is beautiful, and if you have any taste you too will find it beautiful" and Danto saying "This object, this material expression of an idea, is interesting and I will explain to you why it is interesting and once you 'get' my refinied conceptual apparatus, you too will find it interesting?""
you've asked a very deep question and I don't have a quick answer for that. I think Danto has some trouble with this one too and nothing he says quite seems to overcome the objection. Also, Benjamin when he talks about doing the first criticism that refuses to judge gets himself all wrapped up explaining exactly what the hell he actually IS doing then. Anyway, nicely put, I'll try and come up with the answer in the next couple of decades or so.
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 9, 2005 4:06:34 PM
Another quick note on the above.
Danto actually takes pains to point out that he isn't a 'relativist' about art or anything. He, in fact, calls himself an essentialist. His point, to make a long story short, is not that you can't define art anymore, but that some of the earlier definitions were A) wrong and B) unaware of their historical contingency.
When abstract expressionism died Clement Greenberg was, as it were, ass out of theory to deal with the new things that were actually happening in art.
But when Danto actually tries to define exactly what art is in the age of pluralism, and exactly what one is doing when one crticizes art now, he isn't at his most persuasive. He says in a couple of places that for something to be a work of art it has to A) be about something and B) embody its meaning, which is a start maybe but I'm not wowed by it. He seems to think that this embodying meaning stuff can get some mileage out of Frege's notion of Farbung (color) and the way that it's a looser, more allusive, way to talk about meaning than Sinn and Bedeutung but I don't know, it feels pretty sketchy.
I also have some good feelings toward Benjamin's notion, stolen from Early Romanticism, that criticism is in the job of complementing or even completing works and thereby wrapped up in them in a way that the critical distance needed for the act of judgment in the more strictly Kantian sense would disallow. But these are thoughts toward something only.
The point is that you have the nose for the crucial question I think.
Posted by: morgan meis | Jul 9, 2005 5:54:12 PM
Morgan’s reading of the early Benjamin’s theory of criticism is very misleading. This is because Benjamin’s notion, following Schlegel, of infinite criticism takes it as a given that only the greatest works of art are to be even so much as considered. Benjamin takes it for granted that we will know what these works are, which is precisely the attitude that pluralism wishes to combat. So while Morgan is right that infinite criticism (criticism that, as Morgan put it, completes the work) is not a criticism of taste, it can only begin after we have made an order of rank. What Moran has done is to collapse this early romantic theory of criticism into what I called in a previous post a material phenomenology of the present. So now the initial canon of great works delivered by the tradition and the normativity that this ranking involves is elided. All cultural objects from the highest to the lowest are part of an infinite text, and the function of criticism is simply to further it. Clearly this follows the trajectory of Benjamin’s career to the Arcades Project which attempts to circumvent reflection upon the material categories which inform modern experience and instead attempts to show or disclose them through an avant-guard form of textuality (fragments, quotation, etc.). Of course, for Benjamin this process of ‘disclosure of the everyday’ was not in the service of Morgan’s quietism, i.e., a explicitly political program to use art in such as way as to affirm the horizon of the present. For Benjamin, unlike Morgan, the material categories of the present are shot through both with opportunities and losses (we could say shot through with contradictions if this term did not make one think that they would dialectically eventuate in a type of reconciliation). The goal is not just the acceptance of the given, as it is for Morgan, but finding out the presents potential for messianic redemption. Now one can say that this part of Benjamin is better left behind leaving us with a philosophy which is affirmative of the horizon of the present. But it is unfair to tag Benjamin with a can do attitude that could only be concocted in California.
Posted by: Steven Levine | Jul 9, 2005 7:11:36 PM
I've been standing on the shore watching this madness flow by, as it were, but what the hell, it's a hot day and I'll jump in and get wet: I think it is a mistake to immediately skip to foundationalistic questions as soon as we have a disagreement with someone about the value of a particular artwork or artist. This always leads to the "what is Art?" discussion in a single step, missing more interesting things on the way down. It is like someone saying "Bush didn't tell the truth about Iraq before going to war," and my responding, "What is Truth?"
But speaking of the realm of truth (and knowledge), I think that many of our hard-won insights there can be profitably imported into the realm of beauty (aesthetics/art) as well. For example, I think it is important to remember the Wittgensteinian insight that meanings are not private, but public entities, and this holds for art as well. That Josh likes lime sorbet is clearly (aesthetically) meaningless by this criterion, and it is good to remember this. Similarly, it may be possible to think of the foundations of Art, not as fixed in some concrete set of concepts, but more akin to a Quinian (or Davidsonian) web of meanings. Just as ostensive definition anchors the web at its periphery in the case of language, some basic (perhaps--dare I say it--even biologically grounded!) agreements over aesthetic principles could anchor a public understanding of Art, and in fact I think it does (this is why most of us are able to agree that Shakespeare was a good writer). Just as Davidson has repeatedly pointed out in the case of language, disagreements over meaning (or anything else) must take place in the context of a much greater agreement, otherwise discussion itself would be impossible. It is worth wondering what constitutes such agreements in the aesthetic case.
In addition, I am surprised that no one has bothered to bring up sociological or even social psychological treatments of Art as a societal phenomenon. These go a long way toward explaining the prices of Koons's works (as status symbols for the rich to own, for example) and the relationships between the players that make up the art world (the galleries, institutions, critics, artists, consumers, viewers, etc.), though they will not answer metaphysical and ontological questions about Art.
Leave Croce, Greenberg, Benjamin, Wollheim, and Danto (not to mention Hume and Kant!) alone for a minute and try to formulate more interesting questions than "What is Art?" and "Is Brittany Spears an artist?", dammit! (Seriously, though, great discussion so far, and I tend to agree with Timothy's last comment...)
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jul 10, 2005 4:05:38 PM
does the fact that koons uses kitch in his work mean that he is not an avant garde artist? ? ?
Posted by: sophie | Nov 11, 2005 10:07:35 AM
I wish i knew the answer to the above Question 'does the fact that koons uses kitsch in his work mean that he is not an avant-garde artist?' Im currently struggling to do an essay on that question if you have any answers please help me.
Posted by: sharon | Dec 12, 2005 5:08:09 AM
I come to this too late for anyone to read this anymore I think but I like the point about how we shouldn't jump to foundationalist discussions.
Koons is good because there's a kind of transcendence in his taking many of the worst trends of our age -- typified by the 80s -- kitsch, superficiality, voyeurism, commercialism, escapism -- and makes us contemplate them when we're looking at his art. It's like staring into an abyss, in spite of its glossy appeal: it is the reductio ad absurdum of our commercialized, anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual world, and I think, pace Koons, that his work is good because it works as criticism. Look at me and my porn-star wife, look at these beautiful vacuum cleaners, I am working to represent what are supposed to be your deepest desires, but I am making you feel a little sick. There's a lot of thrill in that, like vertigo, as I was saying.
Posted by: alex | Jun 28, 2006 9:54:57 AM
What Koons is trying to say to our culture is for us not to be ashamed of our decisions and to feel empowered by the precious around us. As children we are taught that some objects are precious because of where they came from, like a grandmother or best friend or even a trinket from a vacation to another country. Koon's work embodies these fleeting precious moments. These banal objects take up the space in our hearts, on our shelves and in our heads. They help us remember events or loved ones and that these are precious. Koons embraces the notion of precious.
In our post-modernist society we strive to be "that" businessman, staid and forthright ever defending God know what and for whom. Koons allows us the insight into our own psyches and allows us to ponder what it is that really makes us who we are and as we choose to deal with his work on any level we gain an understanding of that. In Koon's eyes we are all ok. This is what shakes conservative art lovers to the core. We as a society of consumers are one in that we do have these humanist existential selves locked inside us yearning to shop to make us happy once again. We are the ultimate comsumers.
Posted by: Jon Coffelt | Jul 17, 2006 12:03:19 AM
The premise I have opened here is that Koons is the ultimate ctitique and we are the consumers he sees us to be. Maybe this negates some of the other theories from previous comments.
Posted by: Jon Coffelt | Jul 17, 2006 12:06:32 AM
Dear Guys
With the present comment I would like to draw your attention to a small story that accompanied the yesterday’s (11/11/06) opening event of an exhibition about Pablo Picasso at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy.
It seems that in the evening before the opening to the public another event was happening behind the scenes.
In the night between the 10th and the11th of November a very strange phenomenon was observed: It seems that Koons’ dog (Balloon Dog) wanted to leave a sign! Unfortunately the security agents of Palazzo Grassi took it away to assure the attention for Picasso.
Well, Balloon Dog encloses a soul, trying to acquire attention by using the potential of a dog. Although his message was very silent we are happy being able to present herewith his sign, the trace of his living.
Balloon Dog needs only a little bit of attention.
I hope that also you will give him some by watching the video of this link.
www.lookmypoo.blogspot.com
Thank you very much for your attention!
With best regards
Posted by: emidog | Nov 12, 2006 8:34:53 PM
Attn: Timothy Don
I feel the need to observe that you copied your phrase "a single-minded devotion to gloss and glitz" word for word from Robert Hughes' "American Visions". I hope that the rest of your criticism isn't made of such copy-paste fixes.
Posted by: Adrienne | Jul 15, 2007 5:24:13 AM
I have stumbled on this discussion during late night roamings on the internet. I found the whole discussion very interesting, not having observed such a thing before. I especially found it interesting that among the several thousand pre and post modern words used by contributors, the word creativity has been uttered only the once - by Mr Don
Posted by: Philip Lock | Oct 5, 2007 8:52:18 AM
koons, that serra guy, warhol, what a bunch of crap. Some guy gets artisans to craft a skull out of gold, platinum, tin, and glues a bunch of diamonds on it and it sells for a ga-zillion dollars, that should tell you sumthin about this stuff some call art.
mxvigil@aol.com Bring-it-on!
Posted by: Xpofrenes Vigil | Oct 15, 2007 10:14:41 PM
I like your puppy. Why not?
Posted by: celebrity tube | Dec 3, 2009 9:13:34 PM
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