Part of the deal, is that you have to be the first guy to convince someone that shit is art.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not arguing that Koons’s work lacks artistic merit, necessarily, just that it isn’t very original.