Exhibition of the week: Jeff Koons, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Jeff Koons

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Through Sept. 21

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“Jeff Koons is the art world’s most polarizing figure,” said Kevin Nance in the Chicago-Sun Times. Supporters believe the sculptor’s shiny porcelain and stainless-steel paeans to pop culture have made him “Andy Warhol’s heir.” Detractors say that he’s “a charlatan who has crafted a lucrative career out of smoke, mirrors, and hype,” shamelessly stealing from both high and low culture. This new retrospective may lead both sides to temper their views. Koons’ worst works—including the explicit images of his porn-star ex-wife, Ilona Staller—do trade in “thuddingly obvious” shock tactics. But his greatest achievements, the iconic sculptures created in the 1980s and 1990s, capture “his genius for elevating the kitschy and the mundane, transforming them into gleaming objects of desire.” Koons’ oeuvre may not stack up next to that of Pollock or Picasso. “But it’s far from the unrelieved waste dump that his haters deplore.”

Actually, it’s worse, said Alan G. Artner in the Chicago Tribune. The problem isn’t Koons’ trashy taste but his intellectual pretensions. Cheesy, subtly sexualized sculptures of Michael Jackson or the Pink Panther are supposedly critiques of celebrity and consumerism. But such sculptures don’t comment

on popular culture’s depravity; they exaggerate and celebrate it. At this point, Koons is less an artist than a salesman, “presenting ever-more tasteless and maudlin objects at ever-higher prices” to collectors who fall for deep-sounding explanations. He can hardly even be said to create his own sculptures anymore: He just comes up with a clever-sounding, saleable idea, and dozens of assistants rush to make it happen.

It’s foolish to pretend that Koons isn’t an important artist, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. But it’s equally foolish to pretend his influence is not malign. Balloon Dog (Orange), a cartoony stainless-steel canine that stands 10 feet high, really is a beautiful object. “If you manage not to enjoy the lustrous pooch, I don’t understand you.” Such visceral enjoyment, however, is short-lived. Even Koons’ monumental works disappear from the brain as soon as you look away. Precisely for that reason, I can imagine no more perfect symbol of our “present era of plutocratic democracy” than Koons’ expensive, empty baubles. “We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time,” but that would just amount to wishing we lived in some other time.