I’ve never heard of Kostabi and am indifferent and perhaps even dismissive to his art. Koons is a helluva lot more famous. Now when Koons first became famous for the notorious basketball and vacuum sculptures, I dismissed him as a two-bit con artist. His sculptures of Michael Jackson and him fucking Cicciolina only confirmed my suspicions. He is also a “conceiver” of art and has craftsmen actually fabricate his pieces, which always kind of rubbed me wrong.
Over the years, I’ve grown a lot more appreciative of Koons. I recently went down to the brand spanking new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (it’s a must see for any fan of modern art) where they had a huge exhibition of Koons’ work. I really love the steel balloon sculptures and can now actually appreciate the basketball and vacuum sculptures which are really amusing (Although, I kind of agree that it gives me the feeling that he’s pulling a fast one on us. I guess it was done a long time ago by Marcel Duchamp with the urinal.). I still think the Michael Jackson and Cicciolina sculptures are lame. However, “Puppy” the flower dog is awesome and cracks me up.
Art is a form of play. Play is the free exploration of a system of constraints. Sometimes these constaints are explicit and formal, like the rules of a game. And sometimes they’re implicit or informal, like the role a child takes in a game of make-believe.
When we approach a piece of art, it’s often useful to ask: “What ruleset should I use to engage with this particular work?” Artworks from different time periods and different aesthetic movements often require different critical stances to appreciate fully.
No particular critical stance is inherently superior to any other. And that’s part of what makes Koons work so interesting. As you say, what IS the difference between a Koons piece and a bit of tacky thrift store kitsch? Or for that matter, what is the difference between the Mona Lisa and a bit of tacky thrift store kitsch? The “play” in a Koon’s piece arises from the tension we feel between our own rules for discriminating between “tacky” and “arty”. Or the tension between the commodification of bespoke high art and the commodification of mass-produced low art. If you want to play with Koons you’ve got to learn the rules he’s operating under (and in opposition to). But the same is true if you want to play a game of soccer in the park. If you don’t know the rules of soccer it looks like just a bunch of pointless running around. The movements of the players only make sense when you understand the context.
A) What ZebraShaSha said. B) What Darryl Lict said (Who’s Kostabi? I’ve actually never heard of him, but I don’t follow this weeks’ contemporary art very well. Just looks like new figural painting with a lot of references (like Mark Tansey, say). From what I see nothing especially groundbreaking, although it’s good looking stuff).
Koons is important because he pushed the envelope of what “art” was (20 years ago, that is) in the same way the Duchamp or Warhol had (and Courbet? Manet? Gericault? Rembrandt? We can go back with this and talk about lots of things that “weren’t real art” at some point).
There’s also a big critical discourse on Kitsch that it all plays into. That’s it’s cheesy and banal is sort of the point.
Obviously nyctea’s a Koons-hater, which is ok (join the majority of people aware of him), but really why is his work more irritating that Duchamp, say? What Duchamp did for mass production and Warhol or Kruger did for media culture Koons is doing for the worst kind of modern popular mass market crap.
Elsewhere on the board I have a long screed about how avante garde art isn’t meant for you (generally speaking, not you but You/Me/We) but rather for the artworld, in the same way no one expects you or I to actually wear haute couture fashion designs-- it’s all a formal experiment and part of a discourse among a particular group of people. Among those people Koons is important, and it doesn’t really matter if you like it or not.
Kostabi did the covers for Guns n’ Roses Use Your Illusion I & II.
I agree with **ZSS ** and Darryl Lict and **Pochacco ** and other posters. I started off hating Koons and feeling like he was laughing at us - probably still is - but when I saw the Puppy at Rockefeller Center, I really enjoyed it. Same with his lily-white Michael Jackson & Bubbles sculpture - I felt like I got that immediately, too.
The whole point to Pop art, IMHO, is to confuse your mental language: If something is framed and in a museum or gallery, well, it’s *Art * and we must be thoughtful and diligent in cracking the piece’s code to appreciate it. Ooooo, I appreciate the subtle brushwork and use of perspective, blah blah blah.
But when you are presented with a Campbell’s Soup can or a comic-book panel, or a balloon bunny or big topiary puppy - it is off-putting. It can be see as making the banal monumental, or a commentary on what is art today, or a commentary on the process of appreciating art - the bottom line is that the conflict can lead to internal dialogue - and THAT’s where the “art” truly happens.
I don’t see Kostabi as Pop - about the only thing he and Koons have in common, near as I can tell, is their mass-produced approach, where they both employ a large number of employees / journeymen to help them produce their art. Koons, in particular, needs folks who can work in stainless steel, etc. I read recently that Koons employs over 90 artisans and staff…
A better name to add to the list with Koons is Damien Hirst, the YBA (Young British Artist - that was a name given to him and a few others over a decade ago), whose sharks in formaldehyde with the fancy titles can really seem like the joke is on you…
Professional football is a similarly exclusionary discourse. Occasionally I stumble across ESPN when I’m changing channels. A non-fan the discussions I hear from the commentators are all meaningless gobbledy-gook. I’m sure if I invested the time to learn more about the game and culture of football I’d find ESPN fun and fascinating instead of pointless and boring. But life is short and there are other things that interest me more.
But is it the FOOTBALL COMMUNITY’s fault that I don’t understand football? Should the commentators on ESPN be targeting me instead of the hardcore fans? Is this evidence that ESPN is elitist and exclusionary?
If you want to play the “art game”, learn the rules. If you don’t want to play, don’t bitch about other people making their own fun with it … .
(And by “you”, I don’t mean you, capybara. I just mean people in general.)
I’d say Koons - I’d never heard of this Kostabi person either. And looking at his stuff, I can see why. Very Meh. I mean, you can see that he certainly thought he was being witty with this one, but it’s just sophomoric. Koons at least occasionally makes me laugh, or go “WTF?” And it doesn’t all look the same.
Why are we comparing these particular guys, again?
I always thought of Kostabi as one of those yuppie wunderkinds, but the one who didn’t go to Hollywood like Julian Schnable, Robert Longo or David Salle.
I can’t say his work developed much at all since the 1980’s, unlike Koons’ (“developed,” not “improved”), nor did his career become as enlarged as much as Koons’ (and for both of them, as well as the others, it was all about their careers). In that regard I have to give Koons the bigger place.
Still, among that generation, Jonathan Borofsy is the lead in a limited field, where artists were like professional golfers: paid playmates of the rich and therefore no more “important.”
I absolutely agree. A lot of people who are perfectly happy to admit that they don’t understand legal code or accounting or cricket or bonsai plant judging or string theory or thirteenth-century music theory or fly-tying or haute couture or HVAC or underwater welding or middle-Armenian orthography or Australian football are incensed when they encounter art they don’t get, and rather than acknowledging that they aren’t supposed to or expected to, really, decide that the art world is trying to pull one over on them or that the artists are pulling one over on the art world. Art is one sphere in which everyone (hyperbolically speaking) claims expertise, or that no expertise is legitimate.
(rant, continued: We saw a lot of these modern art threads last year. I find it a bit frustrating, as a specialist to whom lots of random people feel free to say “nuh uh, you’re wrong!” despite whatever actual facts or methodology helps explain things-- an informed answer tends to be received slightly less well than any other WAG (not as much here as elsewhere, granted). It’s a bit like being a biological science PhD and having freshmen students tell you that you just don’t understand Intelligent Design and that you’re ignorant and misinformed. Opinions are fine, and preferences and taste are fine, but they don’t substitute for facts.)
I had more luck with this site than with the official Kostabi site.
Does Koons do his own oil paintings? Just comparing the oil paintings I liked the Koons ones better (listed under Celebration in the left index). Of course I’m a sucker for whimsy, detail, reflections, and making the small large, so he’s hitting my buttons.
Hah, I’ve never liked Schnabel’s artwork or statements (I have not seen his films), but I just saw him in the Gehry documentary, where he’s interviewed inside and is, like, lounging around in a fluffy white bathrobe with goatee and long hair and sunglasses (looking a lot like The Dude) and I thought, Oh My God, what a prat! He’s become the caricature of a filmmaker!
That’s one of the things I like about Koons – sometimes it’s not that easy to find things like that at a tacky gift shop. For real, there have been a few times in my life when I found myself in a tacky gift shop wanting to buy a tacky figurine, and I’m disappointed because none of the offerings are tacky enough. In my mind, I’ve combined all the tacky aspects of all the tacky figurines I’ve ever seen, and the resulting Archetype of the Tacky Figurine doesn’t exist in reality. I .love how Koons is often able to distill so much out of kitsch and produce something that strikes me as super-concentrated. He’s got a fantastic eye.
And to be honest, I used to hate his work. As a person who was interested in art, and enjoyed a lot of contemporary art, I thought Koons was an idiot. Of course, if one wants to have more involved discussions about an artist, one needs to have more to say than “I think he’s an idiot.” So I read a lot and looked at a lot of his work … and then I started to see the aspects that appeal to me.
The real question I have, as someone who is not too familiar with the world of “high art”, is why in the world should I take this stuff seriously? If someone like Koons makes high art worth millions, who among us isn’t an artist? There seems to be absolutely no distinction between art and nonsense, or between artists and everyone else. What’s the point of even calling something “art” if there’s nothing different about it? The word “art” doesn’t mean anything anymore.
So why should I take discussion about it seriously? “Art” just sounds like any other perch that people stand on to look down on the rest of us from.
You shouldn’t. It’s a complete waste of your time. Just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Some people may act that way. But then … some people feel superior because they’ve memorized zillions of baseball stats. Do you get similarly tweaked at hard core sports fans who “look down” on people who don’t take their games seriously?
The beauty of art is that: a) it is where you find it; and b) it is up to you (i.e., beauty in the eye of the beholder, etc.)
Much of what is considered “Art,” in the classic sculpture, portrait, Michaelangelo, Impressionists, etc. sense of the word is trying to magnify well-known and understood themes and emotions: Beauty, Spirituality, Patriotism, etc. - i.e., Big, Heroic Themes that lend themselves to reverence, a larger size, a special display, etc. We all get that intuitively, it seems.
But if you are open to it, Art, as a tool, can be effective at bringing out ANY emotion. With films, I often have to brace myself when getting ready to see a Scorsese movie - no one, IMHO, is as effective at evoking strong emotional responses like Scorsese - but they aren’t always emotions I want to feel, you know? And Tragedies like Hamlet are a form of Art that draw out VERY difficult emotions, right? Well, Art can make you feel emotions that are painful, conflicting, uncommon, etc.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Pop Art is characterized by using the “language” of Art - special frames, special mounting, larger in size, displayed with reverance, etc. - but focused on things not normally considered Art, like everyday products (Campbell’s Soup), low art (comic books), etc.
Well, Koons has focused on the Pop Art approach for things like bunny balloons, chocolate hearts, etc. If you look at that and think “that’s a gimmick” well, cool - it isn’t for you. But if you look at it - and seeing stuff like this live is essential; seeing his big topiary Puppy in person really changed how I saw it - and find yourself asking interesting questions (“is our commercial society elevating something like that to our Art?”) or getting frustrated in a healthy way (“wow, that must’ve been really hard to make - a stainless steel large bunny is NOT easy to create - and yet it seems to be such a banal thing to englarge - what is going on?”) etc. - well, that is a good thing.
Art is like a Rorschach test - 1 person can look at it and say “it’s an ink blot” and another person can look at the same blot and talk for hours about what they see and how it shapes their thinking. Both are okay - but Pop Art is all about getting that type of reaction out of you…
So, Mosier, I guess I would say: you should only take it seriously to the extent that it gets you thinking and/or feeling in ways that are different enough from how you normally think or feel to be interesting to you. If it is not having that effect, then move on…
