Wrote Romy Golan, a professor of art history, in an essay quoted in "Jeff Koons Killed Her Review/The decision by an arts journal to allow a famous artist to veto a historian’s essay about his work created 'a chilling effect on the critical culture,' a journalism expert said" (NYT).
In an email message, the artist’s representative, Lauran Rothstein, wrote to Golan: “You refer to Jeff’s passive gesture of offering as one of violence.” She added that Golan’s essay had aligned Koons “with extremely negative connotations.”
Golan, the author of “Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars,” which explored the interaction of art and ideology, said she was surprised that the Koons studio had not understood that her essay was complimentary. “What I say about Koons is actually positive,” she said.
Legal angle: To interview Koons, Golan had signed a release that gave Koons the right to “view and approve any footage, still images and/or promotional material that are proposed for use.” Would that include this essay?
Whether it does or not, it was enough to motivate the journal to require her to share her essay with Koons and to decline to publish it when Koons rejected it. It was not enough to stop the NYT from embarrassing the art journal and Koons by writing the article I've linked.
How stupid of Koons — on so many levels.
Posts
27 comments:
I'll a clown making balloon animals over Koons any day.
Yes, even a clown!
Maybe he’s short on cash and need to make 140 million on a defamation lawsuit.
A fist full of sphincters?
Well, I don't like the piece, but I don't see the "tension" in it. Nor do I see, let's see: beauty, meaning, historical significance... I know nothing about this artist, but the interplay between him and the critic seems silly to me. Don't become an artist if you don't want people to critique your work - just make what you feel moved to make and keep it in the attic until you die and your kids have to deal with it.
The purity testing will continue until all of the participants have been cancelled.
Koons is a fraud and a huckster. The woman should be embarrassed for writing about him as though he had ANY legitimacy. There are many impressive and talented artists in this world, but the likes of Jeff Koons is what gets promoted. It is crap. Koons, Emin, Hirst, and too many others to mention are all worthless scam artists (okay, I guest they ARE artists...). Wander around the Art Institute in Chicago for a few days, then spend a few minutes in the contemporary wing. There will be one or two interesting pieces of art there, but it is mostly trash. Yes, I am a philistine in this regard. Perhaps I am too dim to understand. Perhaps not.
Koons Inc is best understood an investing, marketing, and money laundering firm rather than making and selling art per se. Without strong public relations he'd go out of business in a flash.
Some time ago Wall St. figured out that owning top-tier art could make lots of money (e.g., a painting inflating from $1M to $100M), and so they now treat art as an investable asset class. Then a bunch of living artists joined the corporate money club, as many dead artists (Van Gogh, etc.) made very little money during their own lifetimes. Then a bunch of marginal 'talents' like Koons and Damien Hurst started selling derivative pop art to bring new 'art product' to the investor class. Then other people who made money on sketchy investments (e.g., pyramid schemes; Bitcoin; drugs legal or illegal) bought 'art product' to protect their wealth from regulation or a market crash.
His Michael Jackson is the most disturbing, though not in an artistic way, piece of “art” I’ve ever seen in person.
More publicity for everyone!
Nah. Surely the art world isn't that cynical.
Hmmm, are we referring to the the Islamic terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016 that slaughtered nearly 300 Parisians, wounded more than 500, and traumatized countless thousands? You see, it's really hard to tell from the article, because the writer is so immoral and sly and dishonest and cowardly and craven that she elides any mention of the Islamic terrorists, though she does mention white fascists from many decades ago, which makes it seem as if those are the terrorists whose victims are being memorialized.
And then the Times spends many more paragraphs interviewing editors and curators and law professors and art reviewers, precisely none of whom have the balls to even mention that this is supposed to be a memorial to 300 Parisians slaughtered by Islamists, including the staff of Charlie Hedbo, who literally died defending THEIR free speech, as they whine that their speech is being slightly "censored" by Koons, who demanded that some reviewer remove some sentence from her review of his art. So Paris littered with bodies -- the Charlie Hedbow staff massacred, and neither Koons nor his critics will even passingly mention why and how the victims died, and who killed them. And this art clown is still smart enough to make them pay $3 million to build his stupid, insulting "memorial," which is a giant, uncontextualized hand holding a bunch of what he calls tulips but really look like blown-up condoms.
Thanks, victims!
That is truly the most cowardly article the NYT has ever published, and every person in it is equally cowardly, including Koons.
I hope a survivor, or a relative of one of those 1,000+ victims of Islamic terorism blows that stupid fistful of giant plastic condom-tulips into a million pieces.
And that the French government grows a pair and leaves it there. That would be an artistic statement.
How stupid of Koons — on so many levels.
Hey! I thought great artists were not merely allowed to be temperamental, but in fact are even encouraged to be temperamental? Are you trying to say that Koons isn’t a great artist, Professor Althouse?
For decades I've expected some"modern" artists to hold a press conference to announce, "Dudes, we were kidding. It made us rich and it was fun to watch you all twist yourself into pretzels to find 'meaning' in this crap.
But enough is enough. You are tasteless rubes. Begone."
Koons been baffling 'em with b______t for so long he lost where the line was, now he knows...but does not care.
They are still pretending that pulse was not a terrorist act btw al aqsa flood was 10 bataclans
Everyone mentioned in that article should be chained to the journalist who wrote it and thrown together into the Mindanao Deep. The video will be worth a fortune!
Art, at that level, is a business aimed at appropriating a part of .001%'s stupid wealth.
More power to those providing worthless junk to stuff into freeports.
I read the entire article. Vacuous. Notable for the lack of remark regarding quotes clearly indicating misreading of prior quotes.
The comments, however, cast a modest glow of sanity.
I interpret the whole thing as a cynical, multilayered, PR stunt.
I'm sure the memory of Bataclan et. al. is enriched, now that the really important stuff is being discussed instead.
It seems to me that Koons' agent misread the article. "Bouquet" was commissioned to commemorate the murderous attacks in Paris 2015-2016 in which hundreds died. An unspecified person is offering flowers to an unspecified recipient. Putting flowers on a sidewalk memorial? Putting them on the coffin of a victim in a funeral home? How is this a commemoration, one might ask? Well, the writer of the article makes the argument that this is a commemoration because there is a certain tension in the angle made by the arm which refers to the violence of the attacks. The person leaving the bouquet is perhaps stiff with horror? Or, more likely, the writer, being French, is engaged in sly mockery.
"Mais, Henri, how does this fistful of marshmallows commemorate those days, so terrible, so sauvage?"
"Observez-vous, mon cher Charles, there is a certain angle, vous savez, yes, yes, an angle which indicates fear, blood, grief, mourning. Or anyhow I intend to write an article in Le Monde saying the angle indicates all this."
"Ah, oui, Henri, je comprends, tres naughty. Mais, think you the editors "fall for it" as les barbarian Americains would say?"
"Charles, Charles - they paid hundreds of thousands for that mess and put the it up in a public park, Of course they'll fall for subtle joke."
But maybe Koons did not.
Leaving the question: how is this a commemoration?
I can imagine “Bouquet” sitting outside the employee entrance to a marshmellow factory.
“ Are you trying to say that Koons isn’t a great artist, Professor Althouse?”
He is not an artist at all when what he is doing is interfering with a writer’s ability to publish an article. That has nothing to do with his work as an artist, whatever leeway I’d want to give him as an artist to have a broad range of expression. As to whether he’s a great artist, that’s irrelevant to anything I am talking about or thinking about here.
How stupid of Koons by garnering millions of dollars in free advertising. No wonder he's been such an abject failure hawking kitschy objects as "art". What a maroon.
When my wife and I were in Berlin in '19 we walked very inadvertently (we were tired and jet-lagged, OK?) through an arrangement of flowers, candles, and mementoes on the steps of the Wilhelmgedankenkirche, left there and kept fresh in commemoration of the Isloonic truck attacker of a few years before that killed several.
There's no outline or boundary, just a section in the middle of the broad, low steps. and we only knew what we had done when people pointed out the posters a few feet away and not that visible. At least the Koons looks like it's supposed to be something set apart.
Anyway, it is remarkably inane (like James Taylor's contribution to the commemoration), but the issue was IIUC the power of an artist to cancel a critic's work.
“How stupid of Koons — on so many levels.“
There is no such thing as bad publicity, (the only exception is Hunter Beiden.) Koons won’t be judged as an adult, but as a temperamental artiste.
Althouse: no comment on the purpose and victims of the attacks?
Did that not occur to you at all?
People's throats were slit for practicing free speech.
The can't speak anymore. Can you?
@Althouse (2:58), I was, of course, being facetious with my comment at 11:00. I'm in sympathy with your comment, except that it seems to me that a pretty large number of modern artists try to control their public perception. You know art history vastly better than I do, but my impression is that in bygone days artists let their art speak for itself. In more recent times artists feel compelled to establish a brand and to protect that brand. Warhol is an example of what I mean. But I think we are in "violent agreement" that Koons overstepped, and badly.
A classic case of art world snobbery. An art historian such as Romy Golan can easily spot that the work by Koons is a mediocre derivative of artworks by Picasso (Pablo Picasso Bouquet Of Peace 1958), Leger ( Essential Happiness, New Pleasures. Pavilion of Agriculture, Paris, International Exhibition 1937–2011 by Fernand Léger, 1881-1955, and Charlotte Perriand, 1903-1999) , and our Statue of Liberty.
But the in crowd doesn't care if those tulips by Koons lack any feeling or vitality and they look grotesque. Doesn't matter if the sculpture is a dumb failure and does not celebrate life or honor those whose lives were taken. What matters here, especially to Koons and his dealers, is that this is a Koons sculpture and his works are worth a lot. What matters is his fame and maintaining his reputation and market. Allowing a professional historian to minimize that status is not allowed.
The artists on the highest levels are often the most insecure. Censuring any criticism of this atrocious sculpture is proof of this.
I have no idea how I made that big white space after my comment. Not intentional. Sorry. But look at the dishonesty being aped by every single person involved in the article, the art, and the response. They can't admit that it was Islamic terrorism.
Would it be cutting edge to create such a playful statue for the women raped to death in Israel?
Post a Comment