Essense of Kitsch culture in Koons' work

‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles‘ (1998) by Jeff Koons, as displayed at Versailles

Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognised value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal.


Garden Gnomes are usually considered to be kitschy :)

Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are aesthetically deficient (whether or not being sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative) and that make creative gestures which merely imitate the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Excessive sentimentality often is associated with the term.

Within the period of the New Wave music - the age when fashion went in for increasingly bright hi-tech colours.
In a way Koons testifies to this world of back brushed hairstyles, metal ribbons, lace and ruffles and food that came in ever-more fanciful colours where kitsch culture reigned supreme.

The term kitsch is considered derogatory(meaning lessen), denoting works executed to pander to popular demand alone and purely for commercial purposes rather than works created as self-expression by an artist.

The term is generally reserved for unsubstantial and gaudy works that are calculated to have popular appeal and are considered pretentious and shallow rather than genuine artistic efforts.

The concept of kitsch is applied to artwork that was a response to the nineteenth century art with aesthetics that convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama, hence, kitsch art is closely associated with sentimental art.

cultural thoughts on exhibition

Jeff Koons’s controversial installation at Versailles, France

People up in arms about displaying American modern contemporary art in such a revered, historical space such as Versailles, a quintessentially French national and cultural symbol.


What people think about his exhibit
http://artobserved.com/2008/09/go-see-jeff-koonss-controversial-installation-at-versailles-france-through-december-14/

The New York Times headline reads At Versailles, an Invasion of American Art

Elaine Sciolino writes:
America has invaded the gilded chambers and sculpted gardens of the Château de Versailles in the form of an exhibition by the American superstar artist Jeff Koons. Versailles in recent years has displayed only a few select works of contemporary artists. The exhibition of 17 Koons sculptures marks the first time that the chateau built by Louis XIV has organized so ambitious a retrospective of one contemporary artist. The exhibit, which opened on Wednesday, will continue until Dec. 14

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/11/arts/design/20080911_KOONS_SLIDESHOW_index.html

His work remains largely veiled by mystery precisely because the artist rarely give himself away to criticize the colourful and superficial world he depicts.

Koons does not condemn the system but observes it, deconstructs it and plays with it creating his own rules.

The 'Pop' World no longer suggests fantasy (as in the sixties) but reality: middle class America has now attained a greater level of prosperity in which consumerism is the greatest common denominator.

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In Alison Chernick's one-hour documentary about Jeff Koons she comments:
'I do find his approach opportunistic, taking Warhol's more astute and "observational" approach to pop culture - an approach that highlighted the rapidity and ubiquity of mass production - and perverting it through the obscene amounts of money and time spent "perfecting" otherwise disposable artifacts from American pop culture'.

'Koons has a uniquely American point of view, capturing the essence of pop culture and converting into pieces that are bright, colorful, and popular'.

'one of the more ridiculous manifestations of the already lazy and indulgent era of post-modernism'. - commenting on Koon's production process/ choice of materials

All of Koons' art enshrines elements of American pop culture in forms that are inert, gargantuan, and "perfect."

Bio, concepts, his thoughts

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)

Postmodern Representations

Harvey Brown, Richard. (1995). POSTMODERN REPRESENTATIONS - Truth, Power, and Mimesis in the Human Sciences and Public Culture. University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago

Section: Postmodern Representation, Postmodern Affirmation
Page 4 Line 25 - 31
Lyotard (1988, 302) suggests, "The real political task today, at least insofar as it is also concerned with the cultural ...is to carry forward the resistance that writing offers to established thought, to what has already been done, to what everyone thinks, to what is well known to what is widely recognized, to what is 'readable', to everything which can change its form and make itself acceptable to opinion in general... The name most often given to this is postmodernism."

Harvey states (Page 13, Lines 15 - 17) In deploying the dialectics of irony, in seeing the irony or in being ironic, we take more seriously the deep ambiguities of all representations, all quests, all truths.

Page 14 Lines 18 -35
Harvey: talking on people's judgement, what is right?
'The practise of such open discourse encourages us to put our own cherished views at risk and recognise the rationality and humanity of people whose ideas and values may be radically different from our own. we also are encouraged to recognise the paradoxical nature of our own pursuit - that the truth (or justice, etc.) that we seek is shaped in our own quest to discover it. This realization of truth in discourse seems to require that we posit Truth outside of discourse itself. To figuratively manifest truth we take it to be literally existent.'

He believes this is largely because the creation of truths locally, historically and provisionally responds to particular needs that the concept of one universal Truth seeks to unify the interest of cognitive and social order.

...
CONSTRUCTION OF REALISM WITHIN CONCEPTS

Section: Realism and Power in Aesthetic Representation
Page 137 Line 24 - 28
Roland Barthes wrote, "Realism...cannot be a copy of things, but the knowledge of language; the most 'realistic' work is not that which 'paints' reality, but which... explores as deeply as possible the unreal reality of language" within a given genre (Barthes 1964, 165, my translation)

Barthes, Roland. 1964. 2La literature, aujord'hui". In Essais Critiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

...
CONSTRUCTION OF REALISM WITHIN CONCEPTS

"the recognition of realism depends conventionally precisely on fidelity to a given mode of representation or repetition" (Heath 1986, 144)

Heath, Stephen. 1986. "Realism, Modernism and Language-Consciousness'. Pg 103-122 in Realism in European Literature, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Martin Swales. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Has Jeff Koons' work been copied/ reproduced...came from anywhere??
...

Section : The Historical Relatively of RealismHarvey, Pg 139, (in essay after quote put surname, publish date and page number - that is all :))
"A genre whose representations are literal and realistic for one public may been seen as metaphoric and imaginary by another"

He goes on...Consider, for example, how conceptions of realism have changed over the centuries for literary and pictorial representations. In both these Fields, those who adhere to older paradigms (The word paradigm (pronounced /ˈpærədaɪm/) has been used in linguistics and science to describe distinct concepts. Its Greek! ) call new modes of representation subjective, arbitrary, or decadent. They see the new modes as deformations of the old canons a rejection of verisimilitude Verisimilitude is the quality of realism in something (such as film, literature, the arts, etc).and realism. They insist that that established paradigm is the only one that yields realistic representations and, hence, that speaks the truth.

...

Harvey: Pg140. 'Some critics even banish from art those representations that do not fit the dominant canon.'

He goes on to say...Contemporary aesthetic conservatives now defend the modernist paradigms against the postmodernism, much as former conservatives once defined the modernist paradigm against postmodernism. For example, in the editorial of the first issue of The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer (1984a) rejected postmodernism as an "insidious assault on the mind" and called for a return to modernist criteria of representation and truth.

Arnold Hauser (1982, 725) put it, every work of art "is historically and aesthetically unique, tied to the instant of its creation, and... different from every other product of its genre. If it identifies with a prototype, it is no longer a work of art"

Hauser, Arnold. 1982. The Sociology of Art. Translated by Kenneth J. Northcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Good quote by Jacques Derrida "A face may exist forever, even if the human race dies out, but knowledge of it doesn't go on without a subject there to do the knowing." (Poststructuralism 73:2002 Oxford University Press:Oxford Catherine Belsey)

Known as Deconstructionism.

So, art...to be art, it must be new, break new boundaries, be something better than what came before...postmodern??

.............

Development...compare Jeff Koons' thoughts with an another artist with similar or different thought or ideas about there own work.

The well known work of the Fountain by Marcel Duchamp is highly acclaimed but is it true art. The Photograph is an elegantly showed but clearly recognizable upturned urinal, signed 'R Mutt 1917'. All that remains of the original, which was never shown, is the photograph, signifier of a signifier, the image of a 'work' which involved no work at all, by the artist who did not exist. Much later Duchamp authorized a number of copes....so technically Duchamp didn't create this piece of work but was globalised for its concept and if one can use the word 'beauty'.

Thiery de Duve has argues that 'Duchamp's work in general, and Fountain in particular, mark a turning point in aesthetics.' (Catherine Belsey 86:2002)

'An object once used in conformance with the concept for which it was produced now finds new potentials uses in the stalls of the flea market' (flea market being society today). This can be supported by the involuntary homage to Marcel Duchamp's work - an object being given a new idea. (Bourriaud, 2002:29)

Saussure's diagram (you have a saved image) of the sign as a self contained oval, with a line across the middle dividing signifier from signified, might give the impression that each signifier brings its own inseparable single meaning. Deconstruction undoes this impression, pushes meaning towards undecidability, and in the process democratizes language.
Meaning, not only the meaning of 'art' but of 'democracy' itself for example are not individual or personal or subjective, since they emanate from language.
(Catherine Belsey 87:2002)

'Human rights are a uptopian aspiration and not, in most parts of the world a reality. But they motivate legally binding decisions' (Catherine Belsey 88:2002)
Could move and bring in hyperreality here! :)