Art:21 | Jeff Koons | Season 5 Preview (October 2009)

This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode "Fantasy," premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

"Fantasy" presents four artists — Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen — whose hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime works transport us to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.

Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, framing questions about taste and pleasure. His contextual sleight-of-hand, which transforms banal items into sumptuous icons, takes on a psychological dimension through dramatic shifts in scale, spectacularly engineered surfaces, and subliminal allegories of animals, humans, and anthropomorphized objects.

Learn more about Jeff Koons: http://www.art21.org/artists/jeff-koons

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• art
• artist
• visual
• contemporary
• jeff koons
• sculpture
• mca chicago
• art21

[tctcrules]

as a londoner, i propose the word 'bobby' only be used by english accents... love me a bit of koons though

[CatZula]

@sclapione OvalGray is the one who came up with the completely incoherent string of connections. Wanna get specific or are you just trying to blow smoke...

[sclapione]

@CatZula You talk a load of bull.

[OvalGray]

The kind of wordplay used below to link two randomly chosen subjects (dogs and the apocalypse in this case) is exactly the kind of linguistic system Jeff Koons and other artists use to explain their work; a tactical trick I find as admirable and fascinating as disheartening. Jeff does it better than most artists; therefore he is God.

[OvalGray]

What is God spelled backwards? Dog!

Can we afford to assume that Satan hasn’t come to terms with this mildly comical rearrangement of letters?

It’s high time that men and women of intelligence understand the importance of the God/Dog linguistic phenomenon and not take for granted it’s weightiness in matters of the End Times.

[OvalGray]

It has often, in fact, been pointed out by comedians that if an alien race were to observe our behavior around our pets they would assume that the pets were the owners and we the livestock, the servants, the pets.

This is, of course, exactly how the antichrist will assume control.

What we have to take into consideration is the absolute likelihood of unexpected annihilation. Any elderly man’s Chihuahua could easily possess the soul of Satan; that much is inarguably obvious!

[OvalGray]

The conception of “pet” is an inherently odd one; the idea that any species (in this instance the human species) can own or control another species without equally and oppositely (as the physical laws demand) being controlled by that supposedly controllable species is absolutely inane.

[OvalGray]

In order to fully comprehend the interrelatedness of dogs and the apocalypse, it’s important to understand that the chain of seemingly random events we think of as “everyday life” are in fact an elaborately orchestrated series of pivotal moments adding up (ultimately) to an algebraically necessary end.

[CatZula]

@versafan He doesn't make any of his work. The mastery of materials (which I will grant) isn't his...that credit goes to all of the artists who have fabricated his pieces. As far as their worth in the art world, however, they have little value. They're just variations on Warhol's silver balloons. Not even intelligent variations...

[versafan]

Koons _is_ a great contemporary artist. Walk around his works (I have for dozens of pieces) and you see a mastery of material and of technique (wood, steel, varnishes, polishes, etc). But it doesn't end with the teutonic - his works are mostly visually pleasing, some ironic, some humourous, some shocking. I have found the ones I've seen to be well worth the time considering, and very enjoyable in the process.