No Limits
VALUE SYSTEMS
lighted display systems designed to showcase art and consumer goods. This reciprocity was made abundantly clear when Koons debuted a selection of these works in 1980 in the window of the New Museum on Fourteenth Street, where confused passersby reportedly inquired whether the vacuums were for sale (no. 1, p. 58). 53 These series stressed the market economy’s cult of shiny newness, the next model put before buyers, the multiplicity of options that capitalism offers us to achieve the same ends — a cycle that the contemporary art system perpetuates in its unceasing stress on aesthetic innovation. Unlike Duchamp’s generic shovels and urinals, Koons’s chosen products are conspicuously linked to specific brands. Their makers’ logos and names — Hoover or Shelton — are emphasized on each appliance and in the title of each artwork, which could now also be called “a Jeff Koons,” the product having been borne from one market to another by virtue of a new maker’s mark.54 In his subsequent bodies of work, Luxury and Degradation and Statuary, Koons added yet another Möbius-like twist by taking commercial products already in the guise of collectible sculptures, such as Doctor’s Delight and the J. B. Turner Train, and magically transforming them into yet finer art by casting them in stainless steel. Koons spoke of the former series in particular as a parable of class attainment, expounding on the relationship of each of the sculptures and liquor ads to particular market segments (Baccarat crystal and Frangelico aimed at the rich; a pail and Bacardi for the poor).55 He linked the intoxication of the liquor that literally ran through the show to the dangers of overconsumption and manipulation by corporate concerns. Yet as his prices gained steam, critics observed that his sculptures seemed to reflect their newfound status as market fetishes, grouping his work along with that of Bickerton, Steinbach, and Allan McCollum, among others, under the sobriquets of “commodity fetishism” and “commodity critique.” The jury was out as to whether Koons’s works cynically exploited this situation or critically commented on it, but in neither case could his sculptures be faulted for naïveté about their role in the system or, more generally, art’s newfound one.56 If any proof were needed that markets and marketing were already a self-conscious part of Koons’s early work, one only has to point to the fact that advertising plays a decisive role in five of his first eight series, whether in the reprinted advertisements of The New and Luxury and Degradation, the appropriated Nike posters of Equilibrium, the magazine ads of Banality, or the billboard announcing Made in Heaven. In each case, Koons toyed with the idea of turning an ad into an artwork and an artwork into an ad. The deadpan, appropriative
The other fearful symmetry that Koons’s work lays bare is that of art and money. It’s nearly impossible to have a conversation or read an article about the artist that doesn’t somehow touch on the topic. What may be surprising is that this was pretty much the case from day one. In Koons’s very first review, published in Artforum in 1981, critic Richard Flood deemed the work “a commentary on the glamour of conspicuous consumption,” and it would not be long until the press grew equally fixated on the way Koons’s art was itself so avidly consumed.50 The mid-1980s witnessed an unprecedented surge in the market for contemporary art, and Koons became its poster boy, as writers seemed almost dumbfounded that any artist’s work could attract so much notice and such high prices in so little time. Countless articles described in detail the uptick in his prices, which for Equilibrium began at less than $3,000, then doubled in a matter of months over 1985, so that by 1988 his galleries could plausibly ask $250,000 for each of the three editions of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a rise that exceeded even that of the decade’s bullish financial markets. These statistics were often accompanied by the names of the dealers, advisers, and buyers responsible for the fever pitch, right down to the very month that mega-collector Charles Saatchi entered Koons’s market (December 1985).51 In retrospect, the coverage betrays an air of disbelief and a desire to master it that feels almost poignant. A brave new era was dawning, and it compelled a public vivisection that would be unheard of even today for a thirty-year-old artist. By the time Schjeldahl declared Koons “the artist of the present Age of Money” in 1989, such a statement seemed less opinion than fact.52 And although that critic was referring to the apogee of the Reagan-Thatcher era, the Age and the artist are still so much with us that Koons’s example again proves worth pondering. All of this would be far less interesting if financial values and systems weren’t themselves a self-conscious aspect of Koons’s art. Any monochrome painting can be subject to an accelerating price index without visibly registering that fact. From the start, however, Koons’s art demonstrated a sly and reflexive relationship to the commodities it cannibalized and aped. The early Inflatables, as we have seen, inaugurated his persistent preoccupation with the logic of display, a vital link between the presentation of artworks and commodities. Subsequent bodies of work pushed this interest further. The fluorescent light fixtures of Pre-New lend banal store-bought products an otherworldly nimbus, while the lambent acrylic cases of The New further conflate the types of
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