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John Waters and Jeff Koons on good taste, bad taste and beyond taste
02.25.2014
04:12 pm
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Jeff Koons’ art really divides people. Some say his work is “crass” and all about the money—or that other people “do all the work”—but personally, I love his stuff. When you see it in person, the incredible amount of craftsmanship and just childlike wonder that his epic works inspire, well, they’re really impressive. And FUN.

Many of the most iconic pieces of Koons’ work normally reside within walking distance of where I am typing this now, at the BCAM annex of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The BCAM acronym stands for the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and billionaire art collector Eli and Edythe Broad are probably Koons’ single biggest benefactor/collectors (it’s not like there are all that many people who could afford to be his Medicis). When BCAM’s stunning Renzo Piano-designed building opened to the public—filled to the bursting point with some of the finest examples of postwar modern art that hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars can buy, the wife and I joined the museum. Some of the very, very best Warhols, Baldessaris, Rauschenbergs, Cindy Shermans, Hirsts, Ruschas, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, etc, do not live in Manhattan, but in Los Angeles. My favorite things to look at when I’m at LACMA, though, are the Koons: At one point or another, BCAM has displayed the vacuum cleaners; the floating basketballs; the stainless-steel “Rabbit”; “Bubbles,” Koons’ infamous life-size porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp; a “Balloon Dog” and a “Cracked Egg.”

We’ve got the good stuff out here on the best coast. And last night, we had the artist himself in town, in a special discussion with “the Pope of Trash,” director John Waters—sponsored by Eli Broad’s foundation—at the stunning Orpheum Theatre in downtown. Waters was an inspired choice to interview Koons—aside from the whole bad taste/bad taste issues that make this pairing a natural, Koons actually went to art school in Baltimore, which figures into the conversation.

Referring to Koons’ art, at one point Waters remarks “It stops you in your tracks, and you feel stupid at first, and then you get smarter by the second as you look at it.”

Koons typifies his work as “optimistic.”

Oddly, he credits hearing Led Zeppelin for the first time—not a work of art per se—for spurring his ambition in life.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.25.2014
04:12 pm
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Matthew Barney ‘Cremaster’ action figure, w/ naughty bits


 
Anatomically correct(?) Matthew Barney Cremaster action figure from Mike Leavitt’s brilliant ongoing Art Army project, which will be part of an upcoming Leavitt solo show at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City, running September 10th thru October 8th 8, 2011.
 

 
More examples of Leavitt’s artist action figures with Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Julian Schnabel, seen above and below that, a “group shot” of several artists closely associated with Juxtapoz magazine. Check out Mike’s online store here.
 

 
Below, a trailer for Barney’s Cremaster cycle.
 

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.20.2011
12:35 pm
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Nat Tate: William Boyd’s literary hoax on the art world

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April Fool’s Day 1998, David Bowie hosted a party, at Jeff Koon’s studio in Manhattan, for the launch of William Boyd’s biography of the Abstract Expressionist painter, Nat Tate. As Boyd describes in Harper’s Bazaar, the book, Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928—1960 was, :

...full of photographs and illustrations, and it was written by [William Boyd]. Nat Tate was a short-lived member of the famous New York School, which flourished in the late 1940s and 1950s and included such luminaries as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Tate committed suicide in 1960 by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry (his body was never found) after having burned 99 percent of his life’s work during the last weekend of his life.

It was a coup for the author Boyd to have uncovered this forgotten and ignored artist. He gave interviews to the major dailies, the BBC and alike, and had extracts serialized in the Sunday Telegraph. All well and good, except, Nat Tate had never existed, and Boyd’s book was a hoax.

When I first heard about Nat Tate, from keen researchers suggesting a possible doc, it struck me as bogus. I thought this for two reasons: firstly, I’d just read a weighty tome on Jackson Pollock, which made no mention of this genius Tate. Secondly, and more importantly, it was the name Nat Tate, which sounded more like a Folk singer or a Blues percussionist than a painter. Nat Tate is overly familiarly, and moreover, if he had been an Abstract Expressionist, it would have been Nathaniel Tate, as de Kooning was William and not Bill. Smart ass, maybe, but you see, I’d been regularly writing hoax letters to newspapers under various names (Elsie Gutteridge (Mrs)., Edna Bakewell, Ian M. Knowles, The Reverend Desmond Prentice, Richard Friday and Bessie Graham) since I was a 12, and if these seemed hollow to the ear, then, for me, Nat Tate just didn’t ring true.

Okay, my quibbling dickheadery aside, Boyd had worked hard on making Tate “real”, as he told Jim Crace in the Guardian last year:

“I’d been toying with the idea of how things moved from fact to fiction,” says Boyd, “and I wanted to prove something fictive could prove factual. The plan had been to slowly reveal the fiction over a long period of time, but it didn’t really work like that.”

It took Boyd a couple of years to construct Tate’s persona. It wasn’t so much the framework – the reclusive genius who, conveniently, destroyed almost all of his own work and who killed himself at the age of 32 in 1960 – as the details that took the time. “Much of the illusion was created in the details, the footnotes and in getting the book published in Germany to make it look like an authentic art monograph,” he says.

“I went to a lot of trouble to get things right. I created the ‘surviving’ artworks that were featured in the illustrations and spent ages hunting through antique and junk shops for photos of unknown people, whom I could caption as being close friends and relatives.”

It was a good literary hoax, reminiscent of playwright and artist, John Byrne‘s faux naif painter, Patrick, who Byrne created after he failed to sell his own paintings to London galleries during the 1960s. Byrne claimed Patrick was his father, a self-taught artist, whose his fake paintings proved so successful with critics and cognescenti, they led to a major London show, and a memorable commission from The Beatles.
 
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Boyd went further with his creation, as he managed to get David Bowie, Gore Vidal and Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, in on the act.

“None of them needed much persuasion,” Boyd laughs, “and they all went further that I would have dared ask them. Bowie gave a quote for the front jacket that Tate was one of his favourite artists and that he owned one of his few surviving works.

“Vidal allowed himself to be quoted in the book saying, ‘Tate was essentially dignified, though always drunk and with nothing to say,’ while Richardson told of how Tate had been having lunch with Picasso when he came to visit. It was these details that made it. People stopped wondering why they hadn’t heard of Tate when Vidal, Picasso and Richardson started appearing.”

The best was saved till last. At the launch party for the book at Jeff Koons’ studio in Manhattan, David Lister, the then arts editor of the Independent who was also in on the hoax, spent the evening asking guests what they remembered about Tate. A surprising number seemed to have attended one of his rare retrospectives in the late 60s and everyone lamented how sad they were he had died so young.

The hoax was so good, in fact, that Lister couldn’t stop himself from letting everyone know. “I was pissed off,” says Boyd, “because we had the London launch planned for the following week at a trendy restaurant called Mash, and we were going to repeat the experiment. I’d already done a large number of interviews with British radio, TV and print journalists – who shall remain nameless – and they’d all been taken in. But by the time their copy appeared they all swore blind they knew it was a hoax.

But Boyd’s point was made. And weirdly Tate continues to have a meta-life more real than the rest of us. Tate has now been the subject of three documentaries and has made a walk-on appearance in another fictional memoir, Boyd’s Any Human Heart. His art also lives on. “It’s strange,” says Boyd, “because whenever a friend gets married I always seem to find another Tate in the attic. I’m almost tempted to take one along to Christie’s and see what it sells for.” And most of us would love to buy one. Because some things are too good not to be true.

Boyd writes about the Nat Tate hoax in this month’s Harper’s Bazaar.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.01.2011
08:03 pm
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Jeff Koons Must Die: The Video Game
03.29.2011
02:40 pm
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Hunter Jonakin created this wild 80s-style arcade cabinet that allows you to virtually destroy work by the artist, Jeff Koons. It costs twenty-five cents to play. Could this be a giant FU to Koons because he thinks he owns all likenesses of balloon dogs?

 

 
(via Today and Tomorrow )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.29.2011
02:40 pm
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Jeff Koons is pissed off and he wants your balloon dogs
12.22.2010
11:11 pm
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Koons and one really big expensive balloon dog.

The owners of San Francisco’s Park Life gallery and retail store have been threatened with a lawsuit by multi-millionaire artist Jeff Koons. Jamie Alexander and Derek Song were selling a small plastic balloon dog sculpture that kind of looks like Koons’s balloon dog sculptures which kind of look like the balloon dogs clowns have been twisting and tying at children’s birthday parties since the 1920’s - 30 years before Koons was born.

Alexander and Song posted the following message on their website:

Park Life just received a very formal Cease and Desist Letter from Jeff Koons’ Lawyers calling for an “Immediate Cessation” of selling our Balloon Dog sculptures.
Wait, I’m confused, isnt his ENTIRE FUCKING CAREER based on co-opting other peoples work/objects????
So going forward, just so you know; Jeff Koons owns all likenesses of balloon dogs.”

Ironically, Koons has been sued repeatedly for copyright infringement for his use of…

[...] pre-existing images, the original works of others, in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.”

A Koons balloon dog (of the smaller variety) will set you back several thousand dollars. The Park Life balloon dog was 34 bucks.
 
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Park Life balloon dog
 
Via TB

 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.22.2010
11:11 pm
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Jeff Koons ?
11.06.2009
07:01 pm
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New work from Jeff Koons will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills from Nov. 14 through Jan. 9, 2010. The gallery?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.06.2009
07:01 pm
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