Photo by Nathan Keay. © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Installation view of “Jeff Koons” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2008

© Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, "I Could Go For Something Gordon’s" (1986). Oil inks on canvas, 45 x 63 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

Andy Warhol Jeff Koons Investors Indulge Appetite for Luxury Crazy for Koons Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian Phillips de Pury Makes Its (Small) Mark The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway) The Appendix: New Museum Scandal Edition

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In his catalogue essay for the Jeff Koons retrospective, the show’s curator, Francesco Bonami, writes: “The greatness and poetry of Koons’ work dwell in his power to lead the viewer to believe in what the artist himself believes.” Bonami continues, “The cynical are doomed. We concede to the victory of a relentless optimist, of a true believer in the mystical power of art to change the world and transform our lives.”

For 20 years Jeff Koons and his champions have insipidly, albeit steadfastly, served him up as a genuine “believer.” His critics levy the adjectives “artificial,” “cheap,” “sensational,” “phony,” and “cynical,” expressing distrust of Koons’s celebrity and his apparent earnestness. Might it be worth considering, on the occasion of this major museum retrospective, that both these positions miss the mark? While debates that frame Koons as either the gladsome evangelist of consumer aesthetics or a satirical post-Warholian “simulator” may be convenient, they both fail to acknowledge Koons’s enduring faith in what can only be called classical standards of beauty, not to mention the imperialist undercurrent that emerges from his desire to maintain such standards in a prevailing climate of cultural pluralism.

The show—Koons’s first major US museum survey in 15 years— successfully underscores this untimely faith. Installed in the museum’s two main galleries is a collection of iconic pieces that represent the artist’s 10 distinct bodies of work produced between 1979 and 2007, from his earliest series, titled “Pre-New” (1979–80) and “The New” (1980–87), a sequence of encased and hanging home appliances, to his most recent “Hulk—Elvis” paintings. The show’s commingling of works from different series—stuck together without regard for chronology—zeros in on how consistently (and blatantly) Koons has peddled sentimentality attached to a narrow brand of American consumer culture over the past three decades.

Koons’s objects are raised high on pedestals and glorify themselves amid his lustrous, ambitious “Celebration” works, a series that simultaneously ushers the viewer toward the bathos of burgeoning consumerism and revels in the classical economy of objects of adolescent desire. But the paintings, mirrors, and appropriated advertisements do not make the most compelling backdrop to his authoritative artifacts, which reign in the two vast halls, never seeming to lose their glory. Unfortunately, the north gallery is interrupted by an awkward build-out that shields young eyes from Ilona’s Asshole (1991), Silver Shoes (1990), and Manet (1991), the overreaching soft-porn images that Koons produced of himself and his then wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, engaged in explicit sexual acts.

In the south gallery, three “equilibrium tanks,” basketballs suspended in aquariums, crowd Koons’s wry, bronzed Aqualung (1985). Its neighbors are Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), the large-scale porcelain of the entertainer and his pet chimp, which sits next to Cracked Egg (Magenta) (1994–2006). The glassy monumental ovum sits adjacent to a silver bust called Italian Woman (1986), which is located just next to the famed stainless steel Rabbit (1986). The compression of these works and others from Koons’s repertoire presents viewers with an unseemly web of Western values, and when taken together, the works reverberate with pseudo-xenophobic smugness. For Koons, truth resides in the banal, explicit, and reproducible flotsam of late capitalism: in the image of a jumbo salted pretzel (Couple, 2000), a Gordon’s gin ad (I Could Go for Something Gordon’s, 1986), and the Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polisher (New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10-Gallon Displaced Tripledecker, 1981–87).