When art and money are suddenly thrown together, oppositional mayhem soon follows, even in a film like Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary, The Price of Everything, (currently at HBO) where the director’s position appears to be held in abeyance. Regardless of how the content is presented, the differences continue to escalate on an uncharted scale in a way that is provocative and tendentious. Though not discussed in the film, the reference point to most of what I heard and saw was the early 1980s when big money overtly entered the scene only to transform contemporary art into a full-fledged commodities industry.

Still, controversy either rages or lingers, depending on one’s point of view, as to how major promotional and investment strategies got so quickly involved with artists across the board – mostly emerging or blue chip, usually ignoring less known mid-career artists– to the extent that the terms of qualitative criticism formerly applied to works of contemporary art would soon become extinct.

The manner by which the film dealt with the variety of interviews is impressive. Whether artists, dealers, collectors, auctioneers, or critics, they did not appear edited in a way that ensured instant closure. Rather each interview held a certain openness that allowed for an indeterminate dialogue to proceed randomly throughout the film. For example, when the curator Paul Schimmel speaks near the opening of the film, one may eventually find his comments reflected in the words of Jeff Koons who appears later in the film, despite the fact they never appear on the screen together. The same could be said of the opposition between the words of Sotheby’s Executive Vice President Amy Cappellazzo and those of renegade painter Larry Poons. Although both are bound to disagree on the connection between money and art, they are still maintaining a dialogue—perhaps on the defensive, but a dialogue nonetheless. While clearly aware of his cinematic tactics, Kahn avoids making universal proclamations as to where art is going once it has gotten the attention of auction houses, curators, and collectors who might actively engage with all three, most likely on separate occasions. It seems important that the point of view of the director stays hidden.

The film offers no blame as to who is responsible for the mess that has come about in recent decades once investors began to discover the logic of creating a market for contemporary art. How could they not? Rather the film points us in the direction of a selected few whose words regarding investment in art take on a character of their own. Even so, we are given opinions more than researched points of view, which will tend to leave some viewers in considerable doubt as to how art got that way and what will happen as a result. More than a few viewers of The Price of Everything have made comments to me to the effect that they thought the content backing the film was substantial, but also depressing.

A kind of business-minded art language is spoken throughout The Price of Everything that often takes the form of banal rhetoric. This occurs between established art world figures (mostly painters) and those who directly or indirectly sponsor them. Listening to the bland, superficial, and predictable jargon of major auction house representatives is not so different from hearing one of the collectors in the film identify a kitsch assemblage in her parlor as a work of “conceptual art.” Or, for that matter, observing artists prance and paint in their gorgeous studios while describing the aesthetic pulse of blue glass spheres or telling us the reason why it was important to paint over one figure in order to keep the other. As participants in the film, they all reside on the same playing field. Yet one might further detect a festering boredom or listless cynicism in their speech. At these intervals, Kahn rarely misses the opportunity to entertain his finely tuned audience by allowing irony to surface, specifically when the painter Gerhard Richter complains that it is not good if one of his paintings is the same price as a house. On another note, we read irony in relation to the various professionals discussing deals that involve hundreds of millions of dollars motivated by the belief that their purchases will ensure art for generations to come. Here, one might pause briefly before raising the question: Who is kidding whom?

Nevertheless, the tale is told and the narration continues as it does between the wily “haves” (Jeff Koons) and the presumably overlooked “have nots” (Larry Poons). The resounding rhyme of these two names first presented themselves in the late eighties when then “postmodern” Jeff was showing in lower SoHo on Wooster Street directly across from an exhibition of new work by the rejuvenated “modernist” Lawrence. The change of Larry’s first name was apparently an act of promotion to clarify the fact that he was no longer painting dots but was extending his densely chromatic surfaces into heroically studded pours. Some of these works were alluded to as the subject of a forthcoming retrospective of paintings, shown in the artist’s studio in the early stages of preparation. This moment in Poons’ legacy was fortunately included by Kahn’s perceptive eye, which suggests the filmmaker’s rigor in coming to terms with the immanence of art as being more than an index of material fortune.

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David Carrier, 2014
Saul Ostrow, 2014
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Gagosian Gallery

Full index entry for “Koons” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

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A ready-made sculpture has an essentially ambiguous, philosophically fascinating double identity: It is a work of art; it is a functional artifact, a tool. Neither Donatello nor Michelangelo could have made a ready-made; like abstract art, they are a distinctive product of modernist artistic culture, for only when there exist a plenitude of machine-made artifacts could ready-mades be created. All works of art, it might be said, have such an ambiguous identity—they are both physical things and art. Michelangelo’s David, for example is a piece of marble and a representation of Goliath’s killer. And, as Arthur Danto famously argued, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box is both a brillo box, a utilitarian artifact and, also, a work of art. But ready-mades complexify how we understand this familiar ambiguity because their nonartistic identity is so self-evident. Duchamp’s Fountain is a urinal—and his Bottle Rack is a bottle rack. How, then, can they also be works of art?

Because ready-mades literally consist of commonplace objects, understanding why the artist selected them, when—after all—there are so many artifacts available– provokes commentary. And because our styles of toolmaking have changed drastically, the history of the ready-made provides an historical perspective on our culture. Jeff Koons’ vacuum cleaners such as New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue Doubledecker (1981–87) and his basketballs, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) is a good example, consist of ready-mades plus containers vitrines for the vacuum cleaners; tanks for the basketballs. And as Larry Gagosian rightly notes, Koon’s very Duchampian public sculpture Split-Rocker (2000)  “really (is) a ready-made.” More exactly, it is a planter composed of two (vastly enlarged) halves of two entirely distinct originals, two different toy rockers, a pony belonging to his son and a dinosaur (“Dino”). Normally ready-mades by Duchamp and Koons are utilitarian objects and so the same size as their source. (This is true also of Brillo Box, which is the same size as a Brillo box.) The dramatic change in scale of the ready-made sources of Split-Rocker means that we become like children faced with a gigantic toy.

Just as Duchamp’s ready-mades inspired elaborate discussion of his erotic imagination, so Koons’ assisted ready-mades provoke discussion of race, gender-politics and economic inequality. Interpreters treat his art as a referendum on our political culture. A generation ago interpretation of Duchamp preoccupied scholars. Now, such is the pressure of historicism his ready-mades require reinterpretation. Urinals similar to Fountain are still used but the bottle rack, employed in Duchamp’s day, as Calvin Tomkins has observed, by “thrifty French families” to reuse “their wine bottles”, looks exotic nowadays to most Americans.

Also discussed in this capsule review: Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art , June 27-October 19, 2014; Marcel Duchamp at Gagosian Gallery, New York, June 26-August 29, 2014

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I am not a fan of Jeff Koons. It is not a matter of his being a symptom of a culture gone bad, or that the work is self-indulgent. It is simply that sometime after the early stainless steel pieces, organized at the Whitney under the title Statuary, I found that it became uninteresting — and over the long years had stopped thinking about it. This retrospective has not changed my mind but it does have me rethinking the nature of his subject, which is not popular culture but the artist himself. The key to Koons is his narcissism — whether actual or faked I do not know.

In a funny way, therefore, I have a newfound respect for his conceptual complexity. A key work that supports my premise of narcissism is not, as it happens, included in the exhibition. The New Jeff Koons (1980) is a self-portrait of what appears to be an enlarged family photo of the artist-to-be exuding the wellbeing of a middle-class boy circa 1960. The young Jeff sits at a desk with a coloring book, a crayon poised in his fingers. This staged photo seems to imply that ‘The New” of the title is meant to indicate perfection in the sense of both pure as well as reinvented.

Koons identifies with his iconographical subjects — they represent both how he hopes to present himself to others as well as his fears as to how he might be perceived. We find the hero, the king, and the demi-god alongside the comedian, the cartoon character strong man and the gorilla. Mirrors and polished surfaces, his most recurrent motif, are in essence narcissistic, a product of someone who in all ways is watching himself. His portrayal of women reveals his fear of them, and his adolescent obsession, which reduces them to sexual fantasy and object. Within his work we also find a record of all he has done to become a celebrity, a star, a success and all he has done to hide his secrets behind a veil of postmodern pastiche, eclecticism, and appropriation.

Such, indeed, Koons’s cleverness often conceals his serious intellectual abilities that I have to consider whether I have been taken in, that the discerned biography is a red herring rather than a sincere expression of the artist’s psyche. This encrypted biography is actually part of Koons’s masterly invention of himself not as artist but as huckster, a con man that promises his audience what they really want, glamour and allure. Yet, even with his declared mission of making things alright, he has made no commercial concession to his popular audience. Instead of creating a mass market for his work he has instead made ever more expensive works — although recently he has signed a deal with H&M to design handbags.

Problematically, to this day Koons’s works do not escape the gravity of Duchamp, or that of the notion of appropriation, which permits everything to become a readymade via its re-presentation, re-contextualization, or re-purposing, the mainstay aesthetics of the early ‘80s. His works in themselves are insignificant — even with the seriousness and insight one can afford them in hindsight, they have not been influential or culturally affective the way, say, Warhol has been. What saves Koons from being reducible to reflections on our material culture and the semiotics of objects is that there is something more personal in his focus on domesticity, perfection (newness), infallibility (expansiveness) and identity. Without these tropes the imagery Koons employs would have revealed itself to be little more than an intellectual form of flower arranging — a motif, in fact, of his early work.

The young Koons, we find at the Whitney, was an assembler who juxtaposes existent ideas and practices. His early works exploit the fact that Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptualism shared an antecedent in Duchamp’s readymade. Koons combines these three movements in cartoonish, multi-colored, cheap inflatable flowers, arranged on or in front of acrylic mirrors so as to multiply their image. The resulting arrangement, as in Inflatable Flowers (Tall Purple, Tall Orange) 1979, make a comic reference to Warhol’s flower paintings while Sponges and Single Double-Sided Floor Mirror, 1978 seems to reference Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements of the late 1960s.

The Flowers are followed by a series of pop-minimalist assemblages in which he combines banks of fluorescent lights recalling Dan Flavin with such household items as a tea pot and a Hoover vacuum cleaner. These were followed by a series consisting of differing models of Hoover vacuums sealed into Plexiglas boxes. More than introducing another of Koons most persistent themes — a pristineness and purity associated with newness — these works produced between 1978–80 also give expression to Koons’s initial intuition that the readymade has the capacity to transform everyday objects into a commentary on the confluence of modernity, technology, aesthetics, mass production, taste and their illusionary nature.

Combining readymade imagery, with which he personally identifies, with a finish-fetish aesthetic and cunning intellectualism, Koons tracks the process by which all aspects of our lives, desires and fantasies — even our neuroses — are objectified, commodified, and culturally sold back to us. Importantly, he does this without implicit or explicit judgment or criticism. Viewed in this manner, his works’ content and potential meaning lies in his shrewd ability to use a thing’s attributes to create analogies and metaphor, rather than commentary. For instance, while his Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules, 2013), and Popeye (2009-12) respectively reference classicism and comics, in turn they each also represent the demi-god, the hero, and the strong man. The irony here is that Hercules is made of plaster and Popeye is carved from granite. Subsequently, along with Buster Keaton, Kiepenkerl, Michael Jackson with Bubbles, Self-Portrait, Hulk (Organ), Gazing Ball (Mailbox), etc. these works in passing index masculinity. Throughout his work other such indices can be assembled concerning women, (love, class, and childhood). Another pattern set early on, is that for each new subject and form he employs a new technology, as well as the highest production values that industry can supply. As such, his works also represent the best that money can buy.

There is a significant shift in Koons’s works grouped as Equilibrium (1985) where he introduces celebrity basketballs afloat in steel and glass tanks. This is followed by Luxury and Degradation, which consists of liquor ads and stainless steel sculptures of kitsch objects. With this work Koons becomes the maker of stand-alone 3D images, rather than representing and arranging objects. At the same time, he has decided to make himself the subject of his work. This is the moment in which Koons appears to win the coveted position held by Warhol, left vacant by his death and that of his heir apparent, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet rather than model himself on the idiot savant Warhol played, Koons emerges as the glad-handed politician and big smile huckster who is willing to repackage for his middlebrow audience high-art as novelty and fetish, and the artist as personality.

He begins to cast in stainless steel things such as Jim Beam-J.B. Turner Train and Louis XIV (1986), producing up-scale facsimiles of souvenir shop items and collectables in glazed porcelain or polychrome wood. These are exhibited under the heading Banality. Koons employs advance technologies, skilled labor, and high production values for these works but as before, these items are not a portrait of our culture so much as loaded meditations on sex, desire, success, masculinity, competence, and self. I suspect both Michael Jackson with Bubbles and Pink Panther (both 1988) are surrogate self-portraits for they seem to sum up Koons’s sense of himself, whether via the tragic creative childlike genius of Jackson or the sly cartoon character whose popularity spurs it on from being a film title character to a classic cartoon series with international appeal. A clue that he might be indexing these images to himself is the contemporary portfolio of four Art Magazine Ads each featuring Koons projecting a different persona.

Made in Heaven (1989-1991) consists of works we might see as collaboration between Koons and his then wife, Italian porn star turned politician Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina). With these works he gives his life over to the spectacle of tabloid journalism and male fantasy. The result is images of him and his trophy (La Cicciolina) engaged in sex presented as over-life-size, highly retouched photographs, printed on canvas and/or made into Venetian glass figurines. These softcore, de-eroticized images, rather than emancipating his audience from shame and embarrassment, undo the promise of pornography, announcing that the fulfillment of male fantasy is sterile — all the ambition driven by self doubt and adolescent desire comes to emptiness.

After his acrimonious divorce there appears to be an eight-year break in Koons’s production. Then under the title Easyfun (1999) he produces a series of colored crystal animal head-shaped mirrors, then with Easyfun_Etheral (2000) his studio begins to turn out collage-like paintings that are highly derivative of the works of James Rosenquist, Sigmar Polke and the later paintings of David Salle. Koons attempts to produce two-dimensional works have in general been uninspired. This may be a result of the fact that it is harder to produce iconic images by appropriating, de-contextualizing, or merely representing existent materials.

Between 1994–2003 he appears not to have been able to produce coherent bodies of work as he had previously done, though he continues to group works under various titles, such as Celebration and Popeye. These works form a confused assemblage of assorted inflatable poolside toys and re-runs of earlier imagery such as the up-scaled balloon dog. All these works seem to be about scale, fetishistic surfaces, production values, and illusion — though one may suspect that they in some way are inspired by Koons growing brood. Then with Hulk Elvis (2006–14), Antiquity (2009) and Gazing Ball (2013) Koons turns to the Pop, Classical and the Baroque periods as references. These works collectively appear to be engaged in an extended and perplexing meditation on masculine identity, women and sex. Many of these recent works sport flowering plants (a sign of optimism?). Along with these he has produced oversized sculptures of the baubles one buys as anniversary and Valentine gifts: diamond rings, heart-shaped pendants, bouquets of flowers. Though much is made of Koons’s happy marriage with six children and the (obsessively) perfectly ordered life, one gets the impression from his work that his psychic life is still full of sexual confusion and a conflicted sense of identity. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that his retrospective introduces the never-before-seen Popeye, and ends with a monumental multi-colored sculpture of unformed lumps of Play-Doh.

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On the ground floor in the very narrow, five story Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan is Glenn Brown’s Oscillate Wildly (After “Autumnal Cannibalism” by Salvador Dali) (1999). Up the steep stairs you come upon Willem van de Velde the Elder’s pen and ink drawing, A Dutch Harbor in Calm, with small vessels inshore and beached among fisherman, a Kaag at anchor and other ships (late 1640s); and then you view oil paintings by Alex Katz, (Provincetown, 1959) Christopher Wool (Jazz and AWOL, 2005) and Alberto Giacometti (Téte de Diego, 1958).  And still further upstairs, amid austere abstractions by Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Brice Marden and Robert Morris, Betty Tompkins’ large acrylic Fuck Painting #4 (1972) is something of a surprise.

All these works are in grisaille, which here is understood not just as another color but the non-color remaining when all other colors are eliminated. North Renaissance masters sometimes painted the outer wings of altarpieces in grisaille. Imitating the look of stone, these constrained images were generally visible only during Lent. Because grisaille is perceptually inert, that non-color is ideally suited to conceptual and minimal art.  Jasper Johns’ Screen Piece 5 (1968) feels withdrawn, and Daniel Buren’s Photo-souvenir: Peinture acrylique blance sur tassi rayé, blanc et gris anthracite (1966) looks sullen. We do, it is true, think of ‘a grey day’ as depressing, but in this gallery, set against intensely colored walls, this ensemble of grisaille works is oddly exhilarating.  When academic art historians have devoted so much bookish attention to identifying relationships between the old masters, the modernists and contemporary”artists, how exciting, how positively life-enhancing it is to see the way “grisaille’ relates American and European art from historically distant periods. The great modernist art writer Adrian Stokes argued that color allows pictorial “organization to be  . . .  intricate: a mutual evocation between forms must take place at all angles and at all distances and in all directions throughout a picture, so that each part will seem rooted in its place and working there.” By asking us to identify felt affinities between very diverse paintings and sculptures, savoring the connections between Jeff Koons’s Italian Woman (1986), Gerhard Richter’s Grau (1974), and John Currin’s L’intimité (2011), all installed in front of five lengths of Joesph Dufour et Cie’s panoramic wallpaper entitled Reconciliation of Venus and Psyche: Psyche Abandoned, Psyche Wafted by Zephyrs (1815), this grisaille ensemble functions as a total work of art.

Luxembourg & Dayan has generously supported this sensationally good exhibition, which was first seen in London last month, with a lavish catalogue containing tipped-in plates, like those found in Skira publications of a half-century ago, a nicely luxurious touch.

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Chrome, Google’s flashy new web browser, is now offering themes designed by artists such as Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Tom Sachs and Dale Chihuly.

What’s a theme?  It’s the thing behind the webpages you are looking at.  All you usually see is that little strip on top, a gray bar.  New themes by artists, designers and fashion celebrities can spice up that little gray bar for you. You can see more of the theme when you click on the “add a tab” button on the top of the page, which shows you your most visited sites in smaller thumbnail images and exposes more of the background.

The Jeff Koons theme is three shiny rabbits on a multi-faceted blue background.  Jenny Holzer’s theme looks like one of her light pieces.

Additional theme options were created by Donna Karen, Todd Oldham, Kate Spade, Oscar de la Renta, Karim Rashid, Dolce & Gabbana, Wes Craven, and Michael Graves. In total, the new gallery features over 90 themes, ranging from simple photographs (Mariah Carey’s face) and patterns to elaborate custom-made designs.

Google offered the artists no compensation for using their images, relying instead on the appeal of having the images seen by millions of people. Most artists declined the opportunity.

Koons was also selected to design the 2010 BMW Art Car.

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“Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years”
C&M Arts until June 5 (45 E 78th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212 861 0020

Last Tuesday, Salvador Dalí would have turned one hundred. Fifteen years after his death in 1989, how is he bearing up, reputation-wise? Some would say the same as ever–perpetually adolescent. Or less charitably, in view of the necro- and coprophilia lurking beneath his camped-up academic style, they would borrow a favorite word of the master’s, “putrified.”

But in a contemporary artworld where abjection, lurid personal confession, identification with kitsch and tongue in cheek, wacko theorizing are accepted norms, maybe he’s due for a revival. The phenomenal public take-up of figures like John Currin and Matthew Barney would suggest there are audiences that never tire of outré iconography aligned to anal craft.

In preparation for the centenary, the Gala-Salvador Dalí foundation in his Catalan birthtown, Figueres, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida teamed up to approach major museums in the world’s art capitals (New York, London, Paris) to organize a fitting reappraisal of his work. There were no takers. Instead, a retrospective is promised later in the year at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Of course, the PMA is one of America’s finest museums, but in the context of a proposed exhumation it is hard to suppress W.C. Fields’s quip about Philadelphia and the grave.

Despite box-office guarantees, then, Dalí has become an artworld taboo. What went wrong for the “Great Masturbator”?

One answer could be that too much went right. The shock tactics and ickly sexuality of his art and antics have been utterly absorbed by what has become a pop surreal mainstream in mass culture: Post-David Lynch, Monty Pynthon and Quentin Tarantino, not to mention MTV, there are few surprises left in Dalí that will raise more than a wry smile from a first-time viewer.

Although Dalí was thrown out of the Surrealist group for political incorrectness (he made a painting deemed disrespectful to the memory of Lenin) in popular perception the artist came to epitomize Surrealism. The public was far more enthralled by his showmanship–giving lectures in a diving suit, twirling his caballero moustache in TV interviews while pontificating about “nuclear mysticism”, or hurling cats at a canvas–than by the subtle dialectics of poets like Paul Eluard or André Breton. He literally took Surrealism global with his “Dream of Venus” pavillion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, creating an organic façade that was a guady riff on Gaudi.

Dalí spent the war years in the United States and was a regular visitor thereafter. As the “Dalí: Mass Culture” exhibition at Barcelona’s Fundación “la Caixa” makes clear, Dalí loved America and America loved him. He would issue a manifesto in 1939 proclaiming the “Declaration of the independence of the imagination and the rights of man to his own madness.” This fascinating, exhaustively researched and flamboyantly presented exhibition is a kill or cure for Dalí’s reputation. While it assembles some of his best work, it makes no effort to disguise the “sell out” aspect of the artist Breton anagrammatically dubbed Avida Dolars (avid for dollars).

From its very outset, his art embraced Americana. In “Girl from Figueres,” (1926), a lovingly painted Ford logo dominates the naively rendered, idyllic provincial townscape. Later he would graduate to Cadillacs, painting flowing dresses on appropriated prints of the luxury automobile. He beat Andy Warhol and Marisol in his realization of the erogoneity of the Coca-Cola bottle.

Dalí’s embrace of mass culture went hand in hand with an ambiguity towards old master painting. A section of la Caixa’s exhibition, which was curated by Fèlix Fanés, is devoted to his obsession with Jean-François Millet’s great nineteenth-century depiction of rural piety, the Angelus. As with his cannibalisation of Vermeer, Leonardo, and Botticelli, Dalí’s attitude towards Millet took to heart Nietzsche’s exhortation to “burn what you love and love what you burn.” He collected an assortment of cartoons and ads trivializing the classic image of a peasant couple praying in a field, with the couple lighting up a Gauloise or listening to a soccer match on the radio, in lieu of prayer, showing that his own abuse of the image was a high-art counter to a popular art phenomenon.

Dalí achieved almost as much notoreity for his film collaborations with Luis Bunuel, “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930) as for his paintings. He worked for Alfred Hitchcock on the dream sequence of Spellbound (1945), struck up a friendship with Harpo Marx, whose portrait he drew, and worked on an animation short (aborted) with Disney. “Dalí: Mass Culture” delves into these projects and his more fruitful relations with the fashion industry and advertising. He produced a whole set of collages for the Bryans Hosiery company: the disengaged stockinged leg was a readymade ripe for Dalification.

And Dali was a readymade himself for American advertising. The exhibition screened four different TV commercials. For Braniff airlines he would announce to the steward, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” and for some forgotten brand of chocolate one mouthful was enough to send his moustache into its legendary handlebar position.

But if Madison Avenue lapped up Dalí, Greenwich Village was another story. Surrealism was a major influence in the emergence of abstract expressionism, but the New York School drew a radical distinction between two types of Surrealism. The American avantgarde liked genuine manifestations of the unconscious but despised “literary” approximations of it, identifying the latter with Dalí’s painstakingly hyperrealist depictions of oneric scenarios and contrived symbolism.

Although Breton came to rue the opportunism of Dalí, he was genuinely taken with his “critical-paranoiac” technique, as Dalí flamboyantly described his trance-like achievement of visions through painterly finesse. The Americans preferred what they saw as the rough and tumble gestures of Masson or Miró as harbingers of unconscious release. Dalí had actually lost much of his artworld credibility even before the intellectual decline of later years, when he embraced his own kitsch celebrity.

By the 1960s, a puritanical emphasis on authenticity had given way in the American vanguard to Pop. La Caixa’s exhibition ends with an Andy Warhol screen test starring Dalí which were used for party projections at Warhol’s Factory. For reasons unkown, Dali’s visage appears inverted, which in a way is a metaphor of the relationship of Pop to Surrealism, which turns the movement on its head. Where Dali and his erstwhile comrades sought the marvelous in the commonplace through bizarre combinations of objects, Pop was content with the vacuity of mass produced objects and images in their pure, unadulterated state. The extraordinary gave way to the ultra-ordinary. The marvelous was trumped by the banal.

To a teenage Jeff Koons in 1970s small town Pennsylvania (he was born in 1955), Salvador Dalí was the epitome of cool, a modern artist to adopt as his role model. He sent a fan letter and was duly invited to meet the great man at the St. Regis Hotel, Dalí’s New York residence. An earlier young unkown granted a similar audience was a billboard painter with fine art aspirations named James Rosenquist. He and Mr. Koons each gave keynote addresses at a special three day Dali conference in St Petersburg this spring.

The “blendability”, in Mr. Rosenquist phrase, of Dali’s touch makes sense in relation to Mr. Rosenquist’s own painting, which in turn is a major influence on the recent two dimensional work of Mr. Koons. Dalí might also be reckoned an influence on Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures: critics in the 1960s spotted the affinity.

Mr. Koons, who is the subect of a landmark celebration of his own, a quarter century survey at C&M Arts in New York, could be characterized as a post-Warhol Dalíean. Many Koons favorites are here: his pristine vacuum cleaners in florescent light strip-lit plexi vitrines; his blow-up balloon rabbit and dog, rendered in gleaming, polished steel, or his lobster, also in steel, accurately painted the colors of the blow-up plastic beach toy original; his “Ushering in Banality,” (1988), a ribboned piglet led by angels in carved polychromed wood statuary; his 7-1/2 wide silkscreened image of himself and former wife Illana Stoller (aka “La Cicciolina,” sometime porn star and parliamentarian) smeared in dirt and copulating on a rock; and a smiling blond waltzing the pink panther, rendered seamlessly in porcelain of rococo finesse. “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” (1988), on loan from the San Francisco MoMA, is an especially confounding if prescient image of the pop star, denegrified, fondling a boyish chimp.

This list and description is enough to suggest that Mr. Koons shares with his adolescent idol a whole set of contradictory extremes: fine craft and banal forms; clean surfaces and filthy images; religiosity and denigration; irony and earnestness. Gone are the pictorial complexity, elaborately coded, arcane symbolism, perceptual ambiguities, and luxuriantly polished personal touch that set early Dalí apart. And yet, the ultimate irony is that much as you may hate it, once it has assaulted your consciousness a Koons is very hard to forget. Let’s see what we think in 2055.

Round-up: Dalí in 2004

“Dalí: Mass Culture” continues at Fundació “la Caixa” until May 23, traveling thereafter to the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida; and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The exhibition was curated by Fèlix Fanés and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Jean-Michel Bouhours, Jordana Mendelson, Lewis Kachur, Robert S. Lubar, William Jeffett, Juan Antonio Ramirez and Estrella de Diego

“Salvador Dalí,” the retrospective curated by Dawn Ades and Michael Taylor, will be at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, September 12, 2004 to January 9, 2005, and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 16 to May 15, 2005

2004 will see the publication of the first volume of the catalogue raisonnée being established by the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí covering the artist’s output until 1930. The research will be made available on the Internet. The Foundation is also publishing the complete writings of Dalí in an 8 volume Catalan and Spanish edition.

The scholarly 500 page catalogue which accompanied “Dalí: Elective Affinities,” curated by Pilar Parcerisas at the Palau Maja in Barcelona this spring, is available in English.

the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí maintains three museums in Catalunya, the Dalí Theater-Museum and Jewel Museum, Figueres; the Gala Dalí Castle Museum, Púbol; and the Salvador Dalí House, Portlligat. For visitor hours and booking arrangements, visit www.salvador-dali.org

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 13, 2004

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