© JEFF KOONS / TATE, GETTY IMAGES, REX, PA
I could communicate that to other
people through my art.” The references
to “self-acceptance” are another
recurring theme in the Koons script.
He moved to New York after graduating
and got a job working at the membership
desk of the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), where he quickly gained a
reputation for his impressive sales patter.
His next move was to Wall Street, where
he worked as a broker selling cotton futures
over the phone. It was the 1980s, an era
associated with yuppies and greed. It’s
part of the mythology around Koons that
his Wall Street background has somehow
been instrumental in his success. But this
is something the artist himself disputes,
insisting that selling commodities was
nothing more than a day job. He did it to
fund his art.
On the Tate website, Koons is described
as an artist who “uses unlikely subjects to
poke fun at comfortable suburban lives
and tastes, and criticise a contemporary
culture driven by commerce”. But he says:
“My work is not about consumerism. I’m
not making a comment on consumerism.”
In the Koons world there is no hierarchy
of objects. “I tend to work with images
that can be looked down upon, but you
have to accept your past and who you are.”
Koons is not criticising suburban taste,
he is putting it on a pedestal.
Working with “images that can be looked
down upon” is central to his practice —
whether it’s inflatable pool toys, balloons,
garden gnomes, gift-shop souvenirs or
household appliances including vacuum
cleaners, pots and pans and pressure
cookers. His role model is the French artist
Marcel Duchamp, who coined the phrase
“readymade” to describe mass-produced
objects that he designated as art. Critics
often describe Koons’s work as kitsch,
a word he hates because it’s judgmental.
He explains to me at length how being
non-judgmental is central to his personal
philosophy of self-acceptance. “The more
you can remove judgment and practice
acceptance, the more you are open to
everything that exists in the world.
Judgment leads to anxiety and segregation,”
he tells me with a Zen-like smile. To start
with I’m not sure whether he believes his
own patter, but after spending a couple
of days with him, I conclude that he does.
Most of Koons’s sculptures come in
multiples — there are four editions ofthe famous stainless-steel Rabbit, one of
which is making an appearance in Florence.
They’re known for being technically very
difficult to produce. Every seam and crinkle
on the plastic toy from which it is created
has been replicated in steel. But instead of
being cute or childlike, there is something
sinister about its dagger-shaped ears and
lack of facial features. When I stand in front
of it, a warped version of my reflection looks
back at me like the distortion in a funfair
mirror. It’s quite unsettling.Alexander Sturgis, director of the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, believes
that Koons’s works must be seen in person
to be appreciated. “It’s their physical
presence — the lunatic care and attention
is tangibly there when you are in front of
them. Some of his surfaces are unlike
anything you encounter anywhere in the
world, super-shiny, coloured reflective
surfaces that are almost liquid.”
It seems appropriate that Koons’s latest
exhibition should be housed in the
15th-century Palazzo Strozzi in Florence,
which was built by wealthy bankers at the
height of the Renaissance. According to
the show’s curator, the art historian Arturo
Galansino, the Strozzi family were big
collectors, comparable to the New York
hedge funders who collect Koons today.
“The Strozzi were the richest men in the
world, who liked to spend huge amounts
of money on art to show how rich they
were. Art history was invented here and
Koons belongs to art history,” he says.
The Palazzo Strozzi, like all museums and
galleries, is reeling from the financial blow
of the pandemic. The hope is that Koons’s
sculptures will pull in the punters.His first wife was a porn
star whom he hired to
model for a sexually
graphic series depicting
them both in positions
from the Kama Sutra
Top: part of the 1989 series Made in Heaven, which Koons made with Ilona Staller, whom
he later married. Above, from left: with Staller in 1992; with his current wife, Justine, 2013Koons with five of his children, from left,
Kurt, Blake, Scarlet, Eric and Sean, in 2012The Sunday Times Magazine • 15