NEW YORK—How do you even begin to introduce Jeff Koons? He’s: the artist who reinvented Duchamp’s readymades for the consumer age and who became a Wall Street commodities broker to support his art-making; one of Charles Saatchi’s early enthusiasms and now one of Eli Broad’s; the holder of the record for most expensive piece by a living artist ever sold at auction; a peddler of kitsch and the sometime husband and porn-partner of Illona Staller (aka La Cicciolina); a serial defendant in high-profile copyright cases; the super-rich supremo of a factory-scale art production company; and the maker of some of the most genuinely perplexing works of art out there. This week the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled three of them on its roof: Balloon Dog (Yellow) (1994–2000), Sacred Heart (Red/Gold) (1997–2005), and Coloring Book (1997–2005). They will be there through October. None has been displayed publicly before, and they will no doubt split opinion among the roof’s up to 800 visitors an hour, as Koons’s work always does — people can’t decide whether it means far more, or far less, than it seems.

Koons is often seen as the contemporary art world’s supreme operator, in the ignoble tradition of Duchamp and Warhol: an intelligent, provocative, consistently self-referential icon who seems to both embody and parody the art world’s worst excesses and to stay one jump ahead of his audience’s expectations at all times.

But the Jeff Koons who talked to ARTINFO in his Chelsea studio last Friday would have none of this. In person he comes across as straightforward and self-effacing, though these qualities are so incongruous with some of the efforts he’s put into self-promotion in the past — including those pictures of himself in flagrante with La Cicciolina and the full-page newspaper ads he took out to highlight the good life that his art buys — that it’s hard to know which presentation, if either, is the real thing. Decide for yourself.

Jeff, would you say you are you the most famous artist in the world?

No, absolutely not. There’s Warhol…

I meant the most famous living artist.

Mmmm…no. I’m ambitious, but I’m ambitious about art, and I’m ambitious about what I can become as an artist. Hopefully I have more to contribute. But how that’s judged is not important.

But isn’t the celebrity-artist Jeff Koons part of the context that you’ve created for your art?

No. There are some aspects of celebrity that come into play, but that’s really not important to me. The word “celebrity” suggests that the artist is important, but it’s not about the artist. It’s about the work.

A lot of people think that I’ve worked with publicity agencies and things like that, but I never have. I’m weary of some of those things …

When the Times runs a piece about you being sued for child support, do you think it’s any of their business? Do you think it has any significance to your work?

I like to keep basically personal things very personal. And by the way, I’ve been paying child-support. Even though my son was abducted and taken to a foreign country and all that, I’ve always paid child support constantly through this whole time.

But I’ve always tried to the best of my ability to be at the service of the work, to give time to communicate and inform and interact with people about the work. I’ve always tried to help the work have a platform, but at the same time I realize that it’s not about the platform, it’s about the visceral art itself.

Can you explain what you mean by “visceral”?

When you view work, it’s not just an intellectual experience. It’s also a physical, biological experience. People like work that makes them feel a certain way. I want my work to have a certain charge, and I think that people who view the work like it, that intensity. It’s the same intensity that I get when I view other artists’ work. I like that. I want more of that. And the greater understanding I have, the more sensitive I am to that.