JEFF KOONS SUPERCONTEMPORANEA

Book: Jeffs Koons Supercontemporanea. Edited by Francesso Bonami. Published 2006. Electa:Milan

Jeff Koons draws on the aesthetic (a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty)of everyday objects by revisiting mass-produced consumer goods and toys, food and home appliances in a new version of Pop Art which created a true artistic revolution during the sixties.

In this period artists such as Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Robert Raushenberg and Roy Licthtenstein(to became only a few) , fused art and everyday life by using ordinary objects, popular icons and advertisements in their work. Their work embodied a critical attitude towards society being easily swayed by the media.

The period was distinguished by an exaggerated cult of appearances, aggressive media communications and a veracious consumer ethic.

This period also incorporated banality (predictably) and converted the everyday into art, Koon's work immediately appeared closely related to the art of Andy Warhol and this led to its being called "Neo-Pop".

So is this were I can talk about Koon's copying the past ideas and creations within art??
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In the eighties however, popular aesthetics immediately had further developments: it was no longer the result of the optimism of the post war period but part of a complex consumer culture driven by the unconscious and people's aspirations. (people's past/and future needs/and what they want to see influencing what they see?)) Koons testifies to a new collective mythology, a fabulous and innocent world driven by nostalgia and desire (Koons interview - his own thoughts support this).

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Artist movements of the seventies - this approach draws upon art movements of the seventies, such as Conceptual Art and Minimalism.
Questioning and inspired by cultural and social battles.
though not politicized and always concrete, many of Koon's work makes use of objects and images that embody metaphorical messages (Metaphor is the concept of understanding one thing in terms of another) that allude the art system itself.

Look towards French Artist Marcel Duchamp to compare his urinal and how his art was perceived before Koon's minimalist and very conceptual approach.

While Duchamp and Warhol remove the 'readymadeness' from its context and raises it to a different level, Koons chooses never to dissociate it entirely from the reality of which it is a part.