Jeff Koons

His father sold furniture in York, Pennsylvania, and decorated interiors, and the showroom taught Koons the first thing he learned about art: that objects are arranged in order to be wanted. When he was nine, his father hung old master paintings the boy had copied and signed in the shop window to draw people in. After school he sold gift wrap and candy door to door. He studied painting in Baltimore and then in Chicago, moved to New York in 1977, and worked the membership desk at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1980 he took a securities license and went to Wall Street, selling mutual funds and then commodities for most of the next six years. He has said the job existed to pay for the art.

Everything comes in series. The New, from 1980, sealed unused vacuum cleaners in lit acrylic vitrines. Equilibrium, in 1983, suspended basketballs in tanks of distilled water, a problem he took to the physicist Richard Feynman. Banality, in 1988, produced life-size gold-leafed porcelain, including Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Rabbit, a steel cast of an inflatable, came in 1986, and Celebration, conceived in 1994, produced the mirror-polished Balloon Dog. Koons makes none of it himself. He directs a studio that at its peak employed more than 100 assistants, on the stated argument that authorship is direction rather than handiwork.

Nobody is neutral. His defenders take him as the legitimate heir to Duchamp and Warhol, an artist who treats desire, class and taste seriously and refuses irony and condescension toward what ordinary people like, and whose fabrication is technically extraordinary. His detractors call the work empty, cynical, expensive kitsch that flatters the people who buy it, and hold that the price is the only content. The record cuts across both. He lost Rogers v. Koons in 1992 over an appropriated photograph of puppies, lost twice more in 1993, and won Blanch v. Koons on fair use in 2006. French courts ruled against him in 2018 and 2019. Made in Heaven, the sexually explicit series made with his then wife Ilona Staller, was widely condemned. In 2019 a Rabbit brought 91.1 million dollars at Christie's, a record for a living artist.

The public commissions have a habit of stalling. A 1996 Guggenheim show collapsed when Celebration ran past its budget, and dealers kept the fabrication going by selling works that did not yet exist. Los Angeles announced a full-size replica locomotive hung from a 161-foot crane in 2007 and never built it. Bouquet of Tulips, offered to Paris in 2016, lost two sites and drew a protest letter from 23 French cultural figures before it was finally unveiled in 2019. The studio has since shrunk and automated. The verdict on him is genuinely unsettled, more so than for almost anyone else on this site.

Jeff Koons's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The New artwork
  Unused vacuum cleaners in lit acrylic vitrines 1980
• Equilibrium artwork
  Basketballs suspended in tanks of distilled water 1983
• Rabbit artwork
  Stainless steel cast of an inflatable toy, in an edition of three 1986
• Michael Jackson and Bubbles artwork
  Life-size gold-leafed porcelain from the Banality series 1988
• Puppy artwork
  A 43-foot terrier planted with tens of thousands of live flowers 1992
• Balloon Dog artwork
  Mirror-polished stainless steel, fabricated over six years in five colors 1994

• January 21, 1955 aged 0 Born in York, Pennsylvania His father dealt furniture and decorated interiors. His mother was a seamstress.
• 1977 aged ~22 Moves to New York and takes a job at the Museum of Modern Art membership desk
• 1980 aged ~25 Shows The New in the window of the New Museum, and becomes licensed to sell securities The Wall Street years paid for the fabrication.
• 1988 aged ~33 The Banality series opens simultaneously in New York, Cologne and Chicago Each object was made in an edition of three, one show apiece.
• 1990 aged ~35 Made in Heaven is first shown at the Venice Biennale The explicit series with Ilona Staller, whom he married in 1991.
• 1992 aged ~37 Loses Rogers v. Koons in the Second Circuit String of Puppies was held to infringe Art Rogers photograph. Two more losses followed in 1993.
• 1997 aged ~42 Puppy is installed outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao A Basque police officer was shot dead foiling an ETA bomb plot at the site.
• May 15, 2019 aged 64 Rabbit sells at Christie's for 91,075,000 dollars A record for a work by a living artist at auction.
• October 4, 2019 aged 64 Bouquet of Tulips is unveiled in Paris after three years of objections Offered in 2016 as a memorial to the victims of the 2015 attacks.

• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. influenced by
• Michael Jackson 1958–2009
  Performer whose recordings, choreography, and music videos redefined global pop stardom. portrayed
• Barbara Kruger b. 1945
  Text-over-photograph art that addresses the viewer directly appropriation contemporary
• Cindy Sherman b. 1954
  Photographed herself as hundreds of other women and insisted that none of it was a self-portrait. appropriation contemporary
• Robert Mapplethorpe 1946–1989
  Photographer whose retrospective set off the 1989 fight over public arts funding shared the culture wars
• Alexander Calder 1898–1976
  Sculptor who invented the mobile and whose kinetic sculptures changed modern art. forerunner in public sculpture