So, just over a year ago now, #7 and I drove out to see the Takashi Murakami retrospective, “Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It was an amazing exhibition, a delightful sampling of Murakami’s work that was both a little exhilarating and a little unsettling.

Specifically, on the lower level of the exhibition I rounded a corner and found myself face-to-face with Invoking the Vitality of a Universe Beyond Imagination (2014), a sculptural self-portrait in shiny, reflective platinum. The sculpture is somewhat disturbing, consisting as it does of an extremely unflattering chibi self-portrait of the artist, naked as the day he was born, slumped in exhaustion, his mouth open in a slack-jawed scream as cute and monstrous creations burst forth from his brow. I immediately began drawing mental connections between it and Jeff Koons’ Rabbit (1986), a reproduction of one of the artist’s early inflatable cartoon bunnies made of polished stainless steel.

That was the unsettling part.

Because I like Takashi Murakami, and I hate Jeff Koons. Actually, hate may be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that I loathe Jeff Koons and his work with the burning fury of a thousand suns. And yet I cannot deny that the two artists are, in many ways, very similar.

In that moment I was forced to confront an opinion that I formulated decades ago and have never really confronted since: Why, exactly, do I hate Jeff Koons so much?

I cannot help but acknowledge that Koons is one of the most successful American artists alive, whose significant works are desired by major collectors and muse ums and often sell for tens of millions of dollars. Hans Werner Holzwarth once suggested that Koons, “…represents the possibilities and conditions of today’s art world like no other — of art itself as well as the market.” Renato Barilli called Koons, “The most representative artist of the last years of this century, of this dying millennium.” Peter Schjeldahl went further and anointed Koons, “…the signal artist of today’s world. If you don’t like that, take it up with the world.”

But even from the beginning Koons has had is haters. Michael Kimmelman called him “the last, pathetic gasp” of a vulgar Yuppie ethos of “self-promoting hype and sensationalism.” Don Thompson noted that, “[Koons] has been called the Ronald Reagan of sculpture; Teflon coated, and bland in the same way a fox is bland.” And of course, no one could hate on Koons like the late Robert Hughes:

• “[Koons] has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida… You can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.”
• “Accusing Koons of hype is like rebuking a fish for being wet…”
• “…[his] ambitions took him right through kitsch and out the other side into a vulgarity so syrupy, gross and numbing, that collectors felt challenged by it.”

But none of this answers the question of why I loathe Jeff Koons. What is it about him that makes me angry every time I see his face, encounter his art, or even just hear his name?

A Jeff Koons-Shaped Void

Well, to help you understand that, I will probably have to walk through Koons’ personal history a bit.

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955.

Young Jeff showed an interest in art and design, so after graduating high school he enrolled in the Maryland Institute of Art. In 1975 he transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began painting surrealistic dreamscapes.

At some point in 1976 Koons seems to have run out of steam. He was finding it increasingly difficult to mine his unremarkable middle-class depths in a way that provided material for his paintings. (Or, as he later euphemistically put it, he “became less interested in personal iconography.”) That, in turn, seems to have soured him on Chicago and the Art Institute, which he found both boring and stultifying in equal measure.

As the story goes, one night Koons heard the voice of Patti Smith on the radio and was so entranced that he listened until the sun came up, then hitchhiked his way to New York. (The slightly less romantic version is that he and a friend made a road trip to the Big Apple.)

Whatever the case, Koons fell in love with New York and permanently relocated there in January 1977. He rented an apartment on Fourth Street in the East Village, got a day job working the membership desk at MoMA, and began making art.

Koons defenders like Eckhard Schneider would have you believe that Koons was an instant sensation, that from the very beginning “every utterance… every work… spark[ed] fiery controversy, time and again.” In actuality, Koons struggled to attract the attention of gallerists and critics.

This is not intended as a criticism, merely a statement of fact. It is not easy for young artists to make a name for themselves. On the other hand, tbe work Koons was producing in this period also did him no favors.

There is a well-known photo of Koons from this era that seems to sum up the moment nicely. He is standing in his apartment which looks like someone opened a T.G.I.Friday’s on H.R. Pufinstuf’s Living Island. The walls are painted with multi-colored polka-dots and decorated with cheap plastic holiday decor. Koons stands in a doorway, his close-cropped conservative hair a startling contrast to his dress: a red aloha shirt topped by a green-and-white stripped vest and accessorized with a cravat made of artificial flowers. He looks like he has three different jobs at three different theme restaurants and is trying to save time changing clothes by wearing all his uniforms at once.

This is a picture of a young man who is aesthetically confused, a young man who does not know who he is and is trying to construct a personality for himself by trying on costumes, but also a young man so uninvested in the process that he cannot even be bothered to create the costumes himself. The end result is affected, contrived, artless, and numbing.

That confusion is reflected in the work Koons was producing. His first notable series, from about 1978 or so, consisted of plastic inflatable objects, mostly cartoon flowers and a couple of oddities like a cartoon rabbit holding a carrot. He seems to have been inspired by the work of Claes Oldenberg to create soft and ironically kitschy objects. The problem is his inability to commit has caused him to stop short of irony and wind up with the object itself. The inflatables are completely indistinguishable from the sort of cheap holiday decoration one might purchase at a hardware store. Which is probably why he could not find anyone willing to exhibit them, and was forced to put them “on display” in his apartment.

Fortunately the upside to being young and awkward is that you can grow out of it. Koons soon befriended other young artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle. He also took advantage of his time at MoMA to expose himself to new aesthetic influences, and found himself drawn to the museum’s extensive industrial design collection.

This led to his next major work, 1980’s The New, which drew in equal parts from that industrial design collection and Koons’ personal experiences growing up around his father’s furniture store and interior decoration business. The series consists of modern household appliances reconfigured as high-gloss readymades: steam irons mounted on fiberglass panels, toasters hung from a bank of fluorescent lights, vacuums arranged in a plexiglas display case.

Ironically, The New does not have anything new to say. That is because the readymade is an artistic dead end. It was an intellectual shock when Marcel Duchamp first attempted to present a mass-produced urinal as an objet d’art. That shock cannot be recaptured, though it hasn’t stopped generations of artists from trying. The only time anyone has even managed to get close was when Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a gallery wall.

Still, the work was interesting enough that Koons convinced the New Museum of Contemporary Art to put it on display. The problem was that “display” consisted of creating a tableau in a street-level window. Once again, Koons had attempted to create the ironic version of the thing and wound up creating the thing itself. Passers-by frequently mistook the art as a department-store window display, and wandered into the museum looking to buy a new vacuum cleaner.

Unable to make ends meet through his art practice, Koons took a job on Wall Street. Breathless biographies often claim that he worked as a stock broker, but even Koons has to admit his job wasn’t nearly as glamorous. Instead, he found himself in a bucket shop at Smith Barney, making cold calls to retirees and trying to sell them mutual funds. That didn’t exactly pay the bills either, probably because Koons spent every cent he earned on his art practice. Eventually this proved to be unsustainable, and for a few awkward months in 1982 he was forced to move back in with his retired parents in Sarasota.

Portrait of the Artist as a Con Man

The bucket shop turned out to be an important part of Koons’ development. During his time there he developed a slick, assertive sales persona that has served him well throughout his career. It also made him keenly aware of the need to have a product that someone would want to buy. And it gave him a very clear idea of the sort of stuff Wall Street assholes liked. Which is to say, basketball and the Sharper Image.

Koons’ 1985 Equilibrium series gave them both in spades. The work consists of minimalist glass-and-steel aquariums containing basketballs in a saline solution, balanced in such a way that they were not touching the bottom or bobbing to the top but floating in a state of eerie suspension. What this is supposed to actually say is unclear, though that hasn’t stopped critics from wasting pages and pages trying to figure it out.

The floating basketballs were exhibited alongside framed reproductions of Nike advertisements featuring famous basketball players. While Koons did apparently have permission from Nike to reproduce the ads, he had absolutely nothing to do with their creation. That did not stop him from presenting them as his own work, crossing a line from “found art” or “appropriation” to straight up “intellectual property theft.”

To get the basketballs perfectly balanced, Koons consulted more than fifty physicists, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman. The story of Koons reading Feynman’s autobiography and cold-calling him to get his advice feels made up, but is probably true. Koons is just presumptuous enough to make a call like that, and Feynman was frivolous enough to entertain an offbeat request. On the other hand, presenting a five-minute phone conversation as a meaningful “collab” is just marketing hype intended to create interest in the work.

Not that gallerists needed to create much interest in the work. The Equilibrium series might be aesthetically uninteresting and intellectually dead but it sold like hotcakes. The basketball tanks turned out to be the exact sort of meaningless executoy that Yuppie scum loved. And regular folks just liked basketball.

Indeed, this seems to be Koons’ real genius: he has a good eye for the audience-pleasing and salable. And as long as he’s making money, no one seems to care that his work has nothing going for it other than being audience-pleasing and salable.

Also notable about Equilibrium is that it is probably the last time Koons was directly involved in the creation of any of the artworks which bear his name.

At some level this is not unusual; artists have historically relied on armies of assistants, and even as modern artists cherish the role of the singular genius they often rely on craftsman to realize their designs — say, using highly specialized artisans to turn a clay maquette into a marble carving. What makes Koons’ turn to this more jarring is that, by his own admission, he can barely even draw, and therefore his role as artist is increasingly removed from the actual work itself. For the most part he is an idea man who provides an employee a brief description or maybe some photographic reference, and then later on he is an editor who reinserts himself into the process through Steve Jobs-level micromanagement. At one point during an interview in his workshop he even admitted: “I have to oversee everything here, and I have to make every decision, otherwise I’d have no relation to it at all.”

That was basically Koons’ role in 1986’s Luxury and Degradation series: providing the initial ideas and stepping back to let others do the work. The series consisted largely of bronze and stainless steel replicas of mid-century barware: ice buckets, tumblers, decanters, a bartender’s tool set in the shape of a golfer, and a promotional model train set made by Jim Bean. These objects were paired with reproductions of contemporary liquor advertisements, this time printed on canvas to make them look classier. Once again it was a suite of high-end executoys, and once again, it sold like hotcakes.

On the plus side it did generate this excellent (if somewhat exasperated) critique from Rachel Kushner:

Koons’ liquor ads are not a commentary, nor are they an ironic appropriation. They are a straight appropriation… Koons is replicating the myth itself, in seemingly empty formality… Luxury and degradation. The issue here is exactly those things, entwined: the palpable contract between those who peddle the promise of luxury and the degraded experience available to the consumer…. Low and a version of high neutralize each other in such a confusing manner that it is, indeed, time for a drink.

The Evil of Banality

In 1989 Koons followed Luxury and Degradation with Banality. Koons biographer Scott Rothkopf claims that, “Banality made Koons the superstar we know him to be today.” Which is inarguably true but not in the sense that Rothkopf means it.

The series is, to put it mildly, all over the place. It consists of a strange series of kitsch images turned into sculptures: cuteified religious icons, Hummel figurines blown up to massive size, Garfield characters interacting with Troll dolls, a woman in a bathtub with a periscope emerging between her legs, a naked woman cuddling a giant Pink Panther doll, and, most famously, Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee Bubbles. These are all executed in luxe-coded and high-gloss materials, and suffused with a Rococo design sensibility that includes coating many pieces with unnecessary gold leaf and mirrors.

If Luxury and Degradation had been designe d to appeal for a sort of nouveau riche businessman with more money than taste, Banality seems to have been designed for some burgeoning oligarch or a third world dictator trying to establish themselves as an aristocrat or possibly evem enshrine themselves as a deity. Someone like Bob Guccione or Donald Trump or Ferdinand Marcos.

Bafflingly, Koons insisted that the work was primarily religious in character, that his intent was, “to use the Baroque to show the public that we are in the realm of the spiritual, the eternal.” It is hard to avoid thinking that either Koons does not know what religion and spirituality actually are, or that he cynically thinks that the American state religion is just mindless consumption.

(In a similarly unbelievable vein, Koons once told an interviewer: “There’s a biological aspect [to my art]. When I say a biological aspect, I believe I choose these things because of who I am and probably who my grandparents were, and who their parents were, and so on.” In the same vein, my work is primarily about the quantum nature of reality, in that I exist in a universe where quantum physics also exists.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Banality series was how it was promoted. About a year before the show, Koons took out a series of full-page ads in industry publications like Artforum and Art in America.

This, in itself, was not unusual. What was unusual was that the ads did not feature the work itself, merely the artist. They showed Koons lecturing an audience of impressionable young children on the subject of “Banality as Savior.” They showed him hugging baby pigs. They showed him astride a miniature pony, flanked by bikini-clad models. They showed him lounging outside a colorful cabana in a hotel bathrobe.

Koons’ name was prominent in large type, and the galleries that represented him were also there (albeit in much smaller type, and made almost impossible to read in three of the four ads). The name of the show, or when it would be on display, was nowhere to be found.

Koons’ intent seems clear: to establish himself as a personal brand more important than any individual work of art. This is branding 101, and is in fact not all that new to the art world — certainly there are artists like Dalí and Picasso and Duchamp and even Monet who engaged in similar endeavors. What is new is a complete lack of interest of the work itself and the relentless focus on the artist as a celebrity. From a commercial standpoint it makes perfect sense, and from an artistic standpoint it is nonsensical. It makes it clear that Koons is more interested in the former than the latter.

Koons’ choice to create a personal brand centered on himself is also odd because most personal brands involve a certain level of, well, personality. Koons, on the other hand, has always been and continues to remain a hollow cipher. His work is shallow at best and interviews seem to indicate that Koons himself is no deeper. He can pay models to fawn over him, he can get David Bowie’s hairdresser to do his hair, he can hire a Vogue photographer to make it all look fantastic, but visuals aren’t a substitute for personality. An airbrushed void is still a void.

The other intention, of course, was to create Koons-the-brand to compensate for the fact that Koons-the-man does not do any of the meaningful work. After all, no one expects Ralph Lauren to be down on the factory floor cutting fabric.

By this point not only was Koons not crafting his own work he was also half-assing the idea generation part of the equation. Equilibrium and Luxury and Degradation both featured reproductions of advertisements Koons had no hand in creating. Many of the works in the Banality series were based on sources like Christian icons, European fashion ads, children’s toys, and novelty postcards which Koons had barely bothered to alter. In fact, for several works Koons’ entire “concept” was to hand existing artworks to his artisans, with the copyright notices clumsily removed, and then telling them to recreate it in three dimensions with merely insignificant changes.

This did not sit well with Art Rogers, whose photograph and postcard of an elderly couple cuddling some puppies was stolen by Koons and turned into a sculpture, with the only noticeable changes being that the puppies are blue and have clown noses for some reason and there are random flowers dotted around. He sued.

Koons’ defense was that this was a parody, though no one has ever been able to meaningfully articulate what he was parodying or how. It is such a shallow and facile defense that it was deservedly laughed out of court. (Indeed, it calls to mind all those “porn parodies” that were the rage for a few years, where the “parody” element seemed to solely be the inclusion of hardcore sex.)

A secondary line of defense was that courts, “simply did not understand the social critique that is embedded in this artistic tradition,” which once again did not explain what the critique was. The plantiff’s rejoinder that Koons was simply “elevating stealing to some level of art” seemed more on point, and Rogers won the suit.

Not that it stopped Koons from appropriating ideas. He just became more careful about the work he was appropriating, making sure it was long out of copyright and in the public domain. Or, alternatively, to make sure he was ripping off a big brand, which would be more likely to appreciate the free publicity and let everything slide.

To Reign in Hell

You can argue about Banality‘s worth as art, but the series did make Koons a celebrity, or at least what passes for a celebrity in the art world.

New opportunities began to open for him up for him.

In 1989 the Whitney Museum invited Koons to participate in their “Image World” exhibition, which gave artists a chance to work in a non-traditional mass media. Koons was offered a chance to create an outdoor billboard.

Around the same time Koons had became infatuated with Hungarian-born Italian pornstar Ilona Staller, better known by her stage name “La Ciccolina.” He had first become aware of her in 1987 when she was elected to the Italian parliament, and later used her likeness in one of the Banality sculptures, Fait d’Hiver, where she lies in a snowdrift gazing up at a pig. (The sculpture is plagiarized from an advertisement for French clothing brand Naf Naf, with Staller replacing the original model.) Anecdotally, he seems to have been low-key stalking her for several months before pulling some strings to engineer a meeting.

At that meeting Koons stunned Staller with a proposal: let’s make a pornographic film together, which he would then turn into photographs and sculptures and, of course, the billboard the Whitney wanted. Staller agreed.

It is unclear what Koons’ endgame was here. He may have wanted to see how low he could go after Banality. He may have just seen porn as another type of kitsch object. He may have wanted to challenge bourgeois social norms about sexuality. He may have been attempting to use Staller’s notoriety to launch his own celebrity outside of the art world. And it is also possible he just wanted to get his dick wet in an internationally famous porn star. Or possibly all of these things at once.

The billboard came first, of course, and it is something else. It depicts Koons and Staller on the banks of a waterfall. She is dressed in a white lingerie set, eyes closed, head thrown back in ecstasy. He is naked and lying on top of her without touching her, and staring distressingly out toward the observer with an expression that can best be described as “confused boredom.” There names are in the lower right corner, and the title “Made in Heaven” is in the upper left corner.

The photos and sculptures followed shortly after. They are graphically explicit, depicting acts of fellatio, penetration, and ejaculation. I had the misfortune of seeing them in person at the Tate Modern in 2010, and they made me sick to my stomach. Not because they’re pornographic, mind you, I’ve been on the internet for thirty years and seen depths of filth that you can also imagine because you are also on the Internet. What makes them nauseating is that they are in such shockingly poor taste.

Some critics have called the work queer-coded, but I don’t think that’s correct. Some of the “queerness” comes from the soft-focus Baroque aesthetic, which is less “queer” and more “the default look of a Penthouse pictorial circa 1989.” The rest of the “queerness” comes from the narcissistic self-regard that oozes from the work. The photos and sculptures are not about spiritual communion or sensual love or animalistic lust. They are about Koons using his power as a celebrity to dominate a beautiful woman and bend her to his will, and also about Koons using his power as artist to force you to bear witness.

The series was a rare misstep for Koons. It was released in the middle of a huge cultural backlash against sexuality, the age of the AIDS crisis and the Moral Majority and “Just Say No” and “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off (To Have A Good Time)” and protests against Robert Mapplethorpe. That did give the work a frisson of transgressiveness, but it also meant that transgressiveness was met with an overpowering hostility. Critic Lynne Cook described it perfectly…

The sheer finesse of their making jangles shrilly with the tasteless vulgarity of the subject matter – pure unabashed kitsch. Yet so arresting are these objects that critics have fallen over themselves trying to coin phrases to indicate precisely how dreadful they are.

It’s notable that even Koons defenders often do not have anything nice to say about the work. It wasn’t intriguing. It was just crude and hostile, in a blatantly obvious way that forced a reexamination of Koons’ earlier work, which was increasingly found wanting.

As the controversy raged on, Koons and Staller became engaged in 1990, perhaps as a form of damage control. They married in 1991 and attempted to market their nuptials as a celebrity wedding, with a highly selective guest list and under-the-table offers to sell exclusive photographs to tabloids. Neither the ploy nor the marriage worked; the couple separated in 1993, engaged in a vicious year-long custody battle over their infant son, and formally divorced in 1994.

Koons rarely speaks about his relationship with Staller or his son, but his public treatment of her is enlightening. At some level he seems to regards her as just another craftsman in his workshop; he needed her talent and expertise to make something with the look and feel of actual pornography, but in a way that made it seem he was the one calling the shots. When he no longer had an immediate need for her talents and had to relate to her on a human level he was quick to discard her.

That Is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie

For the next several years Koons had his hands full dealing with the Maid In Heaven blowback, the Banality plagiarism lawsuits, and the divorce. He tried to keep a low profile, and his career entered a sort of holding pattern. He even had a sort of artistic crisis, as he had to grapple with the fact that he no longer had a clear idea of what the art-buying public wanted. Sale of his work stagnated and he found himself in financial trouble; he had presold several works in his Celebration series to raise money, but could not control his perfectionist micromanagement, creating massive cost overruns that drove him to the brink of bankruptcy.

He was thrown a lifeline in 1997 when he was commissioned to create a giant topiary sculpture of a West Highland terrier for the Guggenheim Bilbao. It is, in many ways, a work ahead of its time. It is banal in a crowd-pleasing way (who doesn’t love puppies?), uncontroversial (who doesn’t love puppies?), monumental in a way that makes it unignorable, and though the concept didn’t exist at the time, highly Instagrammable. In fact, it is Instagrammable in both the best and worst ways — not only is it visually arresting and fun, it is also glibly facile, terminally shallow, and quickly forgotten as it gets pushed down your feed.

Puppy formed the template for the next act of Koons’ career. Stick to things that are crowd-pleasing, don’t court controversy, and paper over the cracks between idea and execution with just enough postmodern jargon to stupefy the critics. The general public will receive it with enthusiasm and flock to be photographed with it, which turns into museum ticket sales, which turns into financial success.

Essentially, he sold museums on the fine art version of boosting tourism by putting a big rubber duck down by the riverfront.

A few years later the Celebration series finally started trickling out.

For the most part it consists of paintings and sculptures recreating small pleasures at monumental scale: jewels and bangles, Weebles, a slice of birthday cake, a LEGO castle, a heap of Play-Doh. It also include what is undoubtedly Koons’ best-known work: a giant stainless-steel replica of a balloon doggie. It is everything Puppy hoped to be and more: crowd-pleasing, striking, instantly recognizable, facile, utterly meaningless, and instantly forgettable. It does not even function as public art because it wasn’t designed with a single exhibition space in mind. It is a photo opportunity, something you take a profile pic with, not something to contemplate because there is nothing beneath the surface. Like its creator, it is a slick highly-polished exterior masking a yawning void.

Because these works’ shallow popularity can draw crowds, they are highly desirabe to museums. But as Christian Viveros-Fauné notes, it’s a deal with the devil:

Koons works act like empty vessels, sucking up all innocent observation, draining every drop of legitimacy available from the white cube, and scrubbing clean the decadent money-obsessed museum culture that insists on celebrating the farce that is his artmaking.

Koons’ other works from this century have, if anything, been even more vapid.

The Easyfun and Ethereal series are incoherent remixes of pop culture imagery. The Gazing Ball series slaps a cheap garden bauble into reproductions of more famous works of art in a way that ruins them aesthetically. Hulk Elvis consists expensive bronze sculptures of the Incredible Hulk that are made to look like cheap and hideously ugly inflatable toys. And the Popeye series is the same thing, just with Popeye.

At some point after 2010 his work just becomes an impossible-to-differentiate aesthetic sludge, remixing pilfered imagery and Koons’ greatest hits into new configurations that are neither interesting or remarkable. It is, in many ways, an anticipation of the AI slop moment we are currently living in.

Perhaps the most annoying thing, though, is that to legitimate the inclusion of Koons in collections the artistic establishment has bent over backwards to justify his work with a barrage of postmodern nonsense.

I must confess that I almost hurled a library book across the room, when I read Norman Rosenthal discussing Girl with Dolphin and Monkey Triple Popeye (Seascape) (2010):

Well, I am looking this painting, and I can see those three Popeyes and the beautiful girl riding a dolphin, and the Popeyes begin to remind me a little bit of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [1907]…

Or, consider the critical analyses of Cut-Out (1999), which consists of an incompetently-drawn cartoon donkey standing in front of Mount Rushmore, with a hole in its head through which Cheerios and a splash of milk can be seen. Apparently the takeaway we are supposed to take from the picture is that “anyone can be president” because of the mere presence of Mount Rushmore, and because milk represents optimism somehow.

My heart goes out to any critic trying to make sense of this garbage. Alison Gingeras attempts to pitch Koons’ message as being something about sincerity…

Being open and simultaneously empty (purged of pathos and criticality), Easyfun is an impenetrable object that serves to unveil the societal expectation of art. Our expectation for an underlying meaning of his work remains opaque – Koons acutely sets into motion a chain reaction of frustration. Humanism’s expectation for soul, authenticity, and any other critical message is denied.

The thing is, Allison, I don’t think that Koons is setting out to subvert our expectations by frustrating them. I think he’s just making meaningless crap because it sells. And there’s nothing “sincere” about that.

Koons doesn’t exactly rebut these charges either. He published a whole book of interviews with Norman Rosenthal, and on numerous occasions throughout the book Rosenthal clearly tries to find a way beneath the surface to something meaningful, and Koons resolutely refuses to let him in and changes the topic. Because he is, under it all, a man who is all surface. He even admits it in his own words:

In a human being there’s density: we have brains, we have blood, we have organs. If you think about the outside world it’s very vacuous, there’s nothing there, there’s empty space. But if you look at an inflatable, all of a sudden its internal space seems empty, even more vacuous than the space around it. Even though it’s a mild change in density gradient, it gives the viewer a more secure view that the world – this vacuous space around them – is a little denser. The inside and the outside become merged, and this gives the viewer a sense of security to feel more open about investigating the internal world.

Sometimes an inflatable rabbit is just a bag of hot air.

Deflation

So, back to our initial question: why, exactly, do I hate Jeff Koons?

It it because his work is popular? No, not really. Popularity and quality are not the same thing, but neither are they exclusive. Lots of good things are popular.

Is it the way he engages with the art market? Yeah, a little. Most artists, at least, have a complicated relationship with the art market, hating the mechanics of it but accepting it as a necessary evil to get their work in front of the public. Koons, on the other hand, focuses on sale price and salability to the detriment of everything else he produces.

Is it that he uses an army of assistants? Not at all, lots of artists use assistants. The issue is less that and that he does almost none of the actual work itself. Koons represents the elevation of management to art, which, combined with the market side of his practice, is part of the shameful glorification of the money man our culture is engaged in.

Is it that he appropriates imagery? Also, yes, a little. There are ways to do it that can work, but Koons just rips things off shamelessly.

Is it that his work is superficial? Also a little. Superficial things can be diverting and even pleasing, and we can all enjoy them from time to time. But one cannot live on a diet of empty treats.

Is it the way he spouts postmodern garbage to make himself sound smarter? Oh, definitely, but the whole art world has that problem.

Is is that he shifted gears from being pointlessly confrontational to being safely crowd-pleasing? Yeah.

Is it that he is cynical? Not necessarily. I love cynicism. I have to, they made everyone in Generation X swear an oath.

None of these things are uniquely or inherently disqualifying. The problem is that Koons is all of these things at once, all of the art world’s manifold vices wrapped up in a single package, with none of its redeeming virtues.

You know how people say that Donald Trump is a dumb person’s idea of a rich person? Well, Koons is less a dumb person’s idea of an artist, than a shallow rich person’s idea of an artist. For decades Koons has been faking it until he made it, and now there’s nothing left to him but fakery, but it doesn’t matter because the image is more important than the actuality. He is quintessentially American in that he’s about as deep as a puddle and only engages in self-reflection when he puts on his face in the morning. He is a salesman who cares about the salesmanship more than the actual product. He is a fast-talking scam artist with a thin veneer of legitimacy. He has even come to resemble his own art, with his face too wide from too much plastic surgery; a plastic person making plastic art for plastic people.

(Worth noting that when I tried to describe exactly why it is I hate Jeff Koons to #7, she immediate shot back with, “Oh, he’s like Bobby Flay,” and that’s it, that’s it exactly.)

In the end, I think I just have to give the last word on the subject to the late, great Robert Hughes:

The surprising thing was that Koons’ main message, that… a person finds “confidence in his position by virtue of the objects with which he surrounds himself,” should have been thought at all new or even interesting; it is one of the hoariest truisms imaginable, except, apparently, to collectors who wanted to display confidence in their position by surrounding themselves with Koonses. Nothing was more delicious to “advanced” taste than an enhanced sense of its own tolerance…

Koons way of looking “radical” is to play a tease… “Don’t divorce yourself from your true being,” he wrote in one of his catalogs… “Embrace it. That’s the only way you can move on to become a new upper class.” There is something nauseating about such unctuous calls to regression from an artist so transparently on the make, even more show, perhaps, than his bizarre claim… that “when somebody sees my work, they only thing that they see is the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” From this elevated claptrap, one might suppose Koons had psyched himself into thinking he was a latter-day Bernini.

Or was it a pose? By now it hardly matters.