Jeff Koons and Antiquity
February 10, 2016
Jeff Koons and Antiquity. – The years bring Jeff Koons the weighty sentimentality of a guru; the more literal the symbolism, the better. He still applies the same formula: iconic superficiality (pop art) executed with modernist sterility, allowing the specific to present itself as absolute – the ring is not a ring but a Ring. The charming kitschiness is not in the pop-art-like subjects, but in the way the seamless finish is always responsible for the mythological elevation of the profane – every work of art by Koons is also a topology of Plato’s theory of forms. Creator by means of 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 it all even more mythological: he, descendant of his ancestors, serves his peers. And so, he chooses to expand his playing field to the history of mankind and its most convincing embodiments: the classics and prehistory. The result is, among other things, a reference to the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, the very first muse, in the form of a purple shiny balloon lady; an illustration of Koons’ spiritual curve and at the same time the object of his inevitable artistic saturation. The thing is all too sentimental, all too religious, and fits seamlessly into a general phenomenon: ‘our archaeological objects’, especially the prehistoric ones, form the most important relics of the atheistic humanism that is descending all over the Western world, and beyond, like a thick blanket – winter has arrived but we do not feel it.
