Here’s enough to put you off your breakfast! Yes that’s right Jeff Koons naked…Again!!! The new issue of Vanity Fair will feature not only an article on the master of kitsch but it also includes a photograph the guy butt naked working out in his home gym. If this doesn’t make you sick prepare for Jeff Koons: The Retrospective coming soon to the Whitney Museum of Amerikan Art. How topical of the curators. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942) will be spinning in her mausoleum.
The article mentions that, Koons, 59, has already begun a strict exercise-and-diet regimen so that he will have ‘a shot’ at working into his 80s. Well at least there is hope he doesn’t reach 90 like Picasso.
As mentioned in numerous articles, Koons’ artworks rarely inspire moderate responses, and the fact that any serious publication will give him press is the only signal of the his achievement. Focusing on everyday rubbish rehashed into highly polished trinketry, Koons’ works eschew typical standards of “bad taste” in art and zero in rather precisely on the vulnerabilities of hierarchies and value systems. As critic Christopher Knight has written “He turns the traditional cliché of the work of art inside out: Rather than embodying a spiritual or expressive essence of a highly individuated artist, art here is composed from a distinctly American set of conventional middle-class values.”
As the critic Robert Hughes once said; “Koons really does think he’s Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. “He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.”