🇺🇸Jeff
Koons

Jeff Koons grew up in York, Pennsylvania, the son of an interior decorator father who ran a furniture shop. As a child he sold candy and gift wrapping door-to-door, and his father would display young Jeff's artworks in the shop window to attract customers. The commercial instinct was native and early. He enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art, transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study under Ed Paschke, and graduated in 1976. For the next few years he made his way to New York and took a job as a commodities broker on Wall Street — specifically at the Museum of Modern Art's membership desk first, then trading commodities — not because he had abandoned art, but because he needed to fund the art he intended to make. He was accumulating capital as deliberately as he would later accumulate critical controversy.

By 1980 he had enough. He left finance, set up a studio in New York, and began making work that looked nothing like what the New York art world valued at the time. While neo-expressionism dominated the galleries — painterly, angst-ridden, European in disposition — Koons began making sculptures that looked like advertisements. His first series, The New (1980), consisted of brand-new vacuum cleaners sealed in illuminated Plexiglas vitrines. They were exactly what they appeared to be: consumer products treated as sacred objects. The implied commentary — on cleanliness, on newness, on the American worship of the commodity — was delivered with such deadpan sincerity that critics initially struggled to locate the irony. There was no irony. Or rather: the sincerity was the irony, and the irony was entirely serious.

In 1986 he cast a stainless steel sculpture based on an inflatable rabbit — the kind sold at dollar stores and used as Easter decorations. He called it simply Rabbit. The surface was mirror-polished to an almost aggressive sheen, reflecting the viewer and the surrounding space back at themselves. It was three feet tall, weighed 45 kilograms, and looked, depending on your disposition, either like a profound meditation on desire and mortality or like the most expensive party balloon in history. In May 2019 it sold at Christie's New York for $91,075,000, the highest price ever achieved at auction for a work by a living artist.

Between Rabbit and global superstardom came many series and many controversies. The Banality series (1988) featured polychrome wood and porcelain sculptures of Michael Jackson with his chimpanzee Bubbles, of Pink Panther, of a bear and policeman. Critics called it kitsch; the market called it essential. The Made in Heaven series (1990–91) was explicit: large-format photographs and sculptures depicting Koons and his then-wife, Italian pornographic film actress Ilona Staller (known as Cicciolina), in various sexual positions. Museums refused to show parts of it. Galleries showed all of it. The art world was simultaneously scandalised and fascinated, which was precisely the point.

His studio has operated at industrial scale for decades. At peak periods he employed over 130 assistants, each responsible for individual technical tasks — one specialist for the polishing of stainless steel, another for the application of paint at specific gradients, another for the fabrication of inflatable forms. Koons directs the whole enterprise from the position of auteur, conceiving the works and overseeing their production without personally executing the physical labour. This has drawn persistent criticism from those who regard traditional craft as an essential component of artistic authorship. Koons's position is blunt: the idea is the work. The making is logistics.

The Celebration series — begun in 1994 and completed over more than a decade — produced the Balloon Dog sculptures that have become the most recognisable images in his career. Five versions exist, in different colours, each approximately ten feet tall and fabricated in mirror-polished stainless steel. One sold at Christie's in 2013 for $58.4 million. The works occupy an impossible space between the utterly familiar and the radically strange: everyone knows what a balloon animal is; nobody has ever seen one quite like this. That is perhaps the defining quality of Koons at his best — he takes the most banal object imaginable and transforms it, through sheer insistence on its perfection, into something genuinely new.