Artist and populist: Jeff Koons

Artist and populist

15 February 2016

Artist and populist: at a certain point, Koons chose to enlist the power of a higher authority. His alliance with petty-bourgeois morality has something cold and distant about it, and, like Christian icons — Jesus on the cross — his work uses that distance to make a great leap forward: it starts interfering with me. “Admit it, Kate, these are the things we all ultimately believe in: happiness, puppies, our ancestors, eternal fidelity — yes, you name it!” Despite the infectious exuberance, I do not feel addressed by that jovial “we”: first, because I really am an atheist in his pantheon, and second, because I know perfectly well that Koons, with the romantic conviction of a liberal, was banking on the majority’s approval, not mine. But he will never get it. The majority distrusts him as the majority once, on reflection, distrusted Robespierre. It senses that it is dealing with a will to power in the form of an artistic moralism looking down from dizzying heights, a line of reasoning too pure to pass for populism. This arouses suspicion, all the more because it — the majority — sees no use for it. So Koons, like Robespierre, still has to rely on figures such as me, willing to cast him as a tragic hero in their megalomaniac fantasies, not to mention the billionaires willing to pay a few million for his work because they see it as a welcome change from the ubiquitous fair-trade quality of art.

(Sometimes, within that generic pretension, space suddenly opens up for a kind of vulnerable, autobiographical sensitivity, as in the Banality series: because he feels a little inferior in the presence of his extremely attractive wife, he surrenders to the fantasy of being the Pink Panther, who has to get by on his beta virility.)