Couldnt agree more with Jed Perls opinion on the current retrospective exhibition of Jeff Koons works at The Whitney: Koons, simply put, is Duchamp with lots of ostentatious trimmings. This is not a pretty sight. Duchamp’s readymades have an almost monastic austerity. Koons has bulked them up, transforming the ultimate insider’s art into the art that will not shut up. For Koons’s supporters, and they are legion, this is an anti-tradition that has become an honorable tradition, with all that implies about the risks and rewards of legitimacy. The art historians, with their addiction to neat chronologies, will tell you that Duchamp begat Rauschenberg and Johns, who begat Warhol, who begat Koons. It has been Koons’s weird instinctive salesman’s genius to capitalize on the art world’s increasingly confused adulation of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, who are nowadays seen as seductive mixtures of trickster, mystic, magus, prophet, virtuoso (and at least in Warhol’s case, huckster).
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 17:41:29 +0000
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