Jeff Koons creates incendiary Art. His work and subject matter have, and always will be, provocative and evocative. Koons himself is the consummate “Explorer” of commercialism and consumerism.
Whether it is Hoover vacuums displayed as modern marvels in Plexiglas vacuums to his inflatable plastic flowers, Koons takes the ordinary and displays them as extra-ordinary. One can’t help but think, if Duchamp and Warhol could create a love child, out would “POP” Jeff Koons!
His fascination with consumerism and pop culture permeates his career. Through out his career, Koons has been a catalyst for morphing the mundane into hyper- realistic versions, which make the viewer awe struck. He took the objects we coveted as children and turned them into larger than life objects—for example his enormous pile of Play-doh, the exaggerated Mylar balloon figures, the eerily large kitsch figurines, and a gigantic train set.
Oversizing these objects shows the proportion of importance and fascination we had for these as children. I appreciate that the scale of these objects has us discarding our jaded adult eyes and forces us to see these objects with the perspective of a child, thus experiencing the visceral memories of child-like wonder.
Cicciolina (Ilona Anna Staller) is a Hungarian-Italian former Adult film star, politician, and singer. Staller gained fame in the early 1970s through her radio show “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” and became widely recognized by her stage name Cicciolina.
She appeared in numerous films and gained attention for being the first to bare her breasts on live Italian television in 1978.
Staller ventured into politics and was elected to the Italian Parliament in 1987, campaignin
One of the most unique figures in late 20th-century European pop culture: actress, performer, politician, sex icon, and symbol of an era in which eroticism, media, and politics explosively intertwined.
Icon of post-1970s sexual liberation;
Pioneer of political celebrity;
Key figure in the discussion about the female body, autonomy, and media.
Born on November 26, 1951, in Budapest, Ilona Staller emigrated to Italy in the 1970s, where she quickly became a constant presence on radio and television.
Elected to parliament in 1987 by the Radical Party, she became the first porn star to hold a parliamentary seat.
Cicciolina had a widely publicized relationship with the artist Jeff Koons, who made her a central figure in the Made in Heaven series.
the photographic series that portrayed the two in the midst of sexual intercourse (but always in favor of the camera), surrounded by flowers and butterflies, like a couple of Adam and Eve in Wonderland.
The fusion between explicit eroticism and contemporary art generated controversy, cult following, and debates about the boundaries between intimacy, spectacle, and the market.
Jeff Koons? A figure at times more mythical than human. Born in 1955 in Pennsylvania, he rode the American dream: after landing in the Big Apple, he quickly found himself climbing the walls of a social climb that led him to the top of the American social upside. But not as an artist, but as a Wall Street broker.
Koons the investor understood before anyone else that betting on collective desires and pleasure was a conditio-sine-qua-non to grab the favors of finance as well as art.
A stringent logic that could only work wonderfully in the eighties, which went down in history as the era of excesses, of unbridled consumerism, when globalization seemed to smile at any person with purchasing power and its dangers were nothing but a vague, shelved, omen.
So, when he decided to pursue an artistic career, he focused on everyday objects, such as the vacuum cleaner and the basketball, which he floated in glass cases to sublimate their (purely aesthetic) essence.
Thanks to the collaboration of great craftsmen (like a medieval workshop) he creates paintings of enormous dimensions depicting inflatables, dolls, advertising products and pleasant shapes, shiny and colored surfaces. The same surfaces that, a few years later, became iconic sculptures, made of pure and very heavy stainless steel to mimic graceful glittering balloons.
Like Tulips or Baloon Dogs: the latter will grab so much enthusiasm from the art market that it will be sold for 54 million dollars, thus setting an all-time record.
When the beloved art broker meets Ilona Staller on his path, it seems that fate smiles on him (in even more dazzling form).
Their relationship was sealed with marriage in 1991. But even that bond, which should be the most intimate and private within an individual's life, turned into a show.
The result was the scandalous works of Made in Heaven, the photographic series that portrayed the two in the midst of sexual intercourse (but always in favor of the camera), surrounded by flowers and butterflies, like a couple of Adam and Eve in Wonderland.
Between rumors and indignation, the works were so successful that they were also transformed into polychrome and glass sculptures.
That love was also fake, a bit like the world of the King of Kitsch?
Perhaps it is not up to us to judge, but what is certain is that, exactly three years later, after giving birth to a son, Ludwig Maximillian Koons, the separation of the two takes place.
It is the beginning of an Odyssey made up of lawsuits, courts and lawyers.
A desperate situation to which the indomitable Cicciolina reacts by defying all the laws: camouflaging him, changing the color of his hair and, literally, kidnapping him, to take him to Rome where he remained under his tutelage until he came of age.
A story that is absurd, but which is only the appendix of a story steeped in excesses. The disputes gradually dissipated, causing trials and a lot of water to pass under the bridge.
The news of the controversy : again Ilona Staller would have sued the auction house Sotheby's New York for auctioning some photos of the Made in Heaven series, without giving her any compensation for copyrights.
The actress sent Luca Di Carlo (her "devil's advocate", known for having had her acquitted of the intentional kidnapping of her son, ed.) on a mission, asking for a total compensation of 21 million dollars.
According to La Repubblica, the actress said: "It is unfair that Sotheby's circulated those photographs using my image, without my permission and without paying me royalties
Koons also has no permission to use my image and has never paid." Will there ever be an epilogue of this modern anti-fairy tale, populated by restless millionaires, at times of human feelings, very often media manipulators?
To posterity the arduous sentence.
