Jeff Koons (born 1955) is a controversial modern artist who lives and works in New York (USA). He became famous during the 1980 s for a series of inflatable flowers and toys, displays of brand new vacuum cleaners and a life-size ceramic sculpture of ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ (the pop idol's favourite chimpanzee pet).
Koon's own biography traces a positive and optimist picture of the figure of an artist, as if this time was itself paradoxically integrated into the society it mirrored. He was born into a middle class family living in the suburbs, his creativity was encouraged by his parents sending him off to have art lessons at an early age. Right from the start of his career Koons preferred spectacular materials that made a strong visual impact (but were quite costly) - this was in the years when people were earning money and spending extravagantly.
Now how could Koons have reflect this in his art without embodying the same principal? Bronze, porcelain and stainless steel required highly complex production processes carried out in speicialist factories.
Koons transformed the banality of the ordinary into a captivating and vital necessity with his early inflatable animals and flowers, which celebrated the seduction of innocence and present home appliances as eroticized metaphors of innovation and well being.
He is quoted as saying that his work exploits ‘mass culture iconography’ (image writing) depiction in the images of a subject - in other words, that he uses images, materials and ideas from popular culture to make his art, and celebrates the ‘banality of middle-class taste’. (Predictable characteristics – knowing their reaction)
In an interview, Koons explained that his hope is "that viewers will become confident of their own judgment and taste ... I tried to remove bourgeois (common characteristic) guilt and shame in responding to banality ... I was telling the bourgeois (typical middle class) to embrace the thing that it likes. Don't divorce yourself from your true being, embrace it. Don't try to erase it because you're in some social standing now and you're ambitious and you're trying to become some upper class."
In his rejection of the distinction between low and high art, Koons is a typically ‘post-modern’ artist. ‘Post-modern art’ is a reaction to the 'consumerism’ that has been made possible by the fact that manufacturing of products, distribution and dissemination have become very cheap.
However, instead of criticizing the ordinariness and commonness of all these products, post-modern art just accepts them, and in Koons' case somehow both celebrates and ironicizes them. (make it big, apparent, in your face art)
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