Jeff Koons and antiquity

10 February 2016

Jeff Koons and antiquity: the years bring Jeff Koons the ponderous sentimentality of a guru; the more literal the symbolism, the better. He continues to apply the same formula: an iconic superficiality — Pop Art — executed with a modernist sterility, allowing the particular to be presented as absolute. The ring is not a ring but a Ring. The appealing kitschiness therefore lies not in the Pop Art-like subjects, but in the way the seamless finish keeps effecting the mythological elevation of the profane. Every work by Koons is also a topology of Plato’s theory of Forms. Creator by appropriation. He has come to experience his self-love as a vast, generous love for ‘the other’, a love accompanied by a strong urge to make everything even more mythological: he, descendant of his ancestors, serves his fellow human beings. And so he chooses to expand his field of play to the history of humanity and its most compelling embodiments: classical antiquity and prehistory. Among the results is a reference to the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, the very first muse, in the form of a shiny purple balloon woman: an illustration of Koons’s spiritual trajectory and, at the same time, the object of his inevitable artistic saturation. The thing is altogether too sentimental, too religious, and fits seamlessly into a general phenomenon: ‘our archaeological objects’, especially the prehistoric ones, constitute the most important relics of the atheistic humanism descending like a thick blanket over the entire Western world and beyond. Winter has arrived, but we do not feel it.