Jeff Koons
[Artist, b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
The entertainment industry, the advertising industry have taken [the] tools from the art world and made themselves much more politically potent. We are really devastated and very impotent right now. A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist.
I learned a lot about the images of pornography and how much they dealt with close-up, when a person is at their most vulnerable and having to reveal details about themselves. I wanted to combine the eternal in two different manners. There is the biological eternal—here is our species reproducing—and then the transparent, spiritual aspect of it.
A photograph for me does not have a sense of spiritual seduction, it does not have an essence, that this is something that permeates and which is eternal through time.
Sex with love is a higher state. It’s an objective state, in which one lives and enters the eternal, and I believe that’s what I showed people. That’s why it wasn’t pornographic.
(On the hard-core self-portraits he made having sex with his wife Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller and exhibited under the title “Made in Heaven.”)
Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.
