Tuesday
Jeff Koons stopped eating cars, now he only eats guitars
I don't feel competent to say much about most purely visual art, though I would have some things to say about a film even if it functioned purely visually and non-narratively, but I liked this article about a major retrospective on the art of Jeff Koons in Chicago, and the following, concluding section especially.
With Koons, it's as though we're seeing objects from our own everyday world transported to a distant place where they have been transformed and reused to vastly different ends, then brought back down to us again without a key to their repurposing, leaving us with no choice but to use them as art. No wonder this show can leave a viewer reeling. Almost every object in it works like a Duchampian ready-made, but at many unearthly removes from its original function. It's as though Duchamp's urinal-become-fountain-become-sculpture were uncovered eons from now, and reused yet again to house a sacred relic. Then buried. Then re-rediscovered and presented as superb ancient art. The object's artistic aura might have been preserved, even increased, with time and its reuses, but its meanings would have become so layered and remote that they could never be deciphered.
