Day: October 15, 2010

My comment to Paddy Johnson's blog post about that photo-painting and sculpture series:

Koons spoke in Dallas years ago right after Made in Heaven--I was living there at the time and likened the performance to a combination of art historian, zen master, and Ronald Reagan. Koons had constructed a retroactive narrative--essentially the "story of banality" that he told and retold--to explain each phase of his career, leading up to the Made in Heaven images. Like Reagan, who generally said nothing but was very congenial, Koons walked us, with calm, slightly psychotic certainty, through wacky explanations of how earlier pieces laid the foundations for the current work, for example, "this is a porcelain pig ushering in banality, the herald of my future perfect love for Illona." It was all so measured and plausible-sounding that by the time he got to showing enormous, projected slides of his skanky porn (in one of the most conservative cities on the planet!), the images seemed logical, inevitable and normal. [AFC c]ommenter Sven (and from what it sounds like, Roberta Smith) aren't accounting enough for the irony in Koons' schtick; porn is not "perfect love" or, jeezus, "emotional vulnerability" any more than his "wholehearted embrace of capitalism" uh, wholeheartedly embraces capitalism.