Jeff Koons

I like the basketballs (especially that they are floating) but not the vacuum cleaners. I love to play basketball, I hate to clean my house. Connected? Maybe, maybe not.

I love the over-sized, stainless steel bunnies, tulips, and balloon dogs. I hate, hate, hate that same glossy finish applied to his figures - MJ, himself, and his porn-star ex-wife. Did a Koons fan come up with the giant Burger King personification that is so nightmarish? They look like yucky blow-up dolls. So blow-up dolls are not okay, but blow-up balloon animals are? Would I like Koons' figures if they were changed to the monochromatic stainless steel? Hmmm ...

I had to take a look at Koons again after I read the interview given to me as part of my art history class. In it, he talks about his love for cereal boxes. That woke me up - yikes! Someone who shares my passion for this kind of art! I can't believe he had the guts to say that. I love that form of advertising. Sometimes I just walk down that aisle in WalMart and just smile. Just look at all the colors and fonts! Look at the graphics! If I taught graphic design, I would definitely have a cereal box assignment - just imagine the competition. Just think about how high that bar is - competing with a wall that has millions of dollars invested in marketing and design. Maybe I like Koons more than I think I do.

Since I was in a "research Koons" moment, I inevitable came across the porn star ex-wife stuff. Absolutely tasteless. Even more so that he included himself in the tableaux, or still-lifes, or whatever you want to call them. I found an interview on Swedish TV where they spoke with him at what appeared to be a photo shoot with him and his "muse" (pre-marriage). He was pretty outspoken and kept referring to the fact that pornography was "her art and she spoke with her genitals" in the same way some artists speak with their paintbrushes. Unbelievable. In the finished sculptures, with all that glossy paint and hyper-coloration, I could only think of taking it one step further: He should have encased it all in a giant snow-globe apparatus, and rig it so that it rotated upside down 360 degrees so that the snow gets shaken up every once in awhile. I would also remove Koons from that composition and let her stand (or lay) alone as the mermaid-y princess-y creature she dolls herself up to be.

I think it must have been Jeff Koons who came up with the BK King, or certainly inspired someone to come up with it. He certainly fits the molded, glossy image. He certainly has the ego. It is unfortunate that his marriage ended. Who wouldn't wanted to be married to a perfectly glossy man?

One of his glossy hearts sold for about 24 million dollars last time it sold. I think I would marry the glossy BK King for 25 million, or just half of that, which his ex-wife certainly earned in the divorce settlement. Well, let me conditionally say that I could conceive of marrying for money - if my porn star career was over. It appears that the divorce was so nasty that Koons destroyed most of the "art" from that period, so only images remain.

Every time I think of Koons now, I will have to keep the basketballs and the stainless steel bunnies in the foreground of my memories. I don't want to remember those really awful, glossy figures. I want to remember that he talked with a Nobel Prize winning physicist to figure out how to suspend that basketball perfectly in the center of that tank. I want to remember that he really likes cereal boxes, and Cheerios in particular (my favorite cereal).

I most of all want to remember that it is important for me as an artist to learn what I like from other artists, and then effectively appropriate it for myself and my own art.