Who is a more important artist, Mark Kostabi or Jeff Koons?

Cafe Society
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[QUOTE=Le Ministre de l’au-delà]
No, it has to be a famous asshole’s shit on a plate. My shit on a plate is just a gimmick. Jeff Koons shit on a plate is an important statement.
[/QUOTE]

Part of the deal, is that you have to be the first guy to convince someone that shit is art.

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Koons is a plagiarist. Oh, he may have won his case (Rogers v. Koons) but in my view he’s not building on something and he’s not doing parody; it was plagiarism, and it’s basically all he does. Let other people do the original thinking.

So almost anybody is a more important artist. Well, not Britney Spears.

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He’s not as big a plagiarist as Warhol was, and it would be hard to seriously argue that Warhol wasn’t an important artist. “Plagiarism” is a legal term, not an artistic one.

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[QUOTE=Hilarity N. Suze]
Koons is a plagiarist. Oh, he may have won his case (Rogers v. Koons) but in my view he’s not building on something and he’s not doing parody; it was plagiarism, and it’s basically all he does. Let other people do the original thinking.

So almost anybody is a more important artist. Well, not Britney Spears.
[/QUOTE]

I think it’s a bit more complex than that. Most art is derivative of previous artists. The particular court case that you refer to is a probably a (copyright?) violation, and indeed it was directly copied. IANAL but I am a mediocre artist, and to settle artistic merit in a court of law is a bit ambiguous IMHO. I’m not convinced that everything Jeff Koons has done is plagiarism.

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[QUOTE=lissener]
He’s not as big a plagiarist as Warhol was, and it would be hard to seriously argue that Warhol wasn’t an important artist. “Plagiarism” is a legal term, not an artistic one.
[/QUOTE]

Warhol took stuff everybody has seen and said: Look again.
Koons doesn’t do that. He takes something somebody else has already done and says: Okay, here’s how I’d do it.
It’s not that different. Sometimes more, mostly less.
Koons sure has great PR though.

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[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
I think it’s a bit more complex than that. Most art is derivative of previous artists. The particular court case that you refer to is a probably a (copyright?) violation, and indeed it was directly copied. IANAL but I am a mediocre artist, and to settle artistic merit in a court of law is a bit ambiguous IMHO. I’m not convinced that everything Jeff Koons has done is plagiarism.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not arguing that Koons’s work lacks artistic merit, necessarily, just that it isn’t very original.