The 20 year old me would have been horrified at hearing that an artist has 120+ assisstants. (Thirteen years ago I also thought money was evil, politicians were looking after us, life was endless, and people were good.) But now I think it’s absolutely amazing that one artist could sell enough work to support 120+ workers. The purist in me still wants to rant but I just don’t go there anymore.
The Art Newspaper spoke with Jeff Koons in his studio about his current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London and his studio/factory.
Here’s a Q&A from the Art Newspaper interview..
TAN: It must be daunting running an operation of this scale. Are you ever tempted to go back to making work by yourself?
Jeff Koons: I used to make all my own sculpture, my paintings, but if I did that it would severely limit the range of projects that I could be involved with. I follow my interests in some way that feels profound to me, those that seem to have a deeper meaning. I feel completely free to do whatever I want to do. But I have to edit my work a lot, because of the process, the amount of time it takes to actually make things, you really have to make the things you want to make, otherwise you’re wasting a lot of energy.
Read the full interview here.
The Serpentine Gallery exhibition in London is showing until the 13th of September. It’s a collection of paintings and sculptures from his Popeye series.
Jeff Koons
Popeye 2003
Oil on canvas 274.3 x 213.4 cm
© 2008 Jeff Koons
I was going to say that Jeff Koons also has one of the best websites of any super-famous artist, but he ruined it by using Flash. Now I can’t even get past his splash screen. I click Enter and nothing. Artists have no idea with websites. I don’t want moving, flashing, screaming, multi-colored, or cluttered artist websites. I just want to see art.. clever websites are just stupid. Here’s a link to an internal page of his website as I just couldn’t get past his silly welcome page.
