'Art'

[don]

most things in our world have their opposite . . . art is no exception

Jeff Koons: a master innovator turning money into art

Jeff Koons has a new retrospective at the Whitney, and the works on display have been valued at half a billion dollars. Here's how he does it

Koons' art might be empty and banal, but he's doing something few other artists do.

Jeff Koons is an impossible artist. That’s a large part of his appeal, in fact: he creates fantastic, impossible objects. And if you succeed in looking behind the mirror-polished surface of his art, you’ll see something quite fascinating, something which speaks volumes about the status of contemporary art in today’s society.

That said, Koons really doesn’t want you looking behind the surface. He’s the king of superficies: you fall in love with his Puppy immediately, involuntarily, unironically. He will critique the banality of consumerism, but he does so by exalting it: never have brand-new vacuum cleaners looked so desirable or perfect. His longest lasting, most expensive, most seductive series of works is actually called Celebration. When you see one of those pieces in the flesh, especially in the beautifully curated context of the Whitney’s massive retrospective, it overwhelms you with its size and presence and reflective depthlessness. It’s bling, but it’s venerable bling, equally at home in the halls of Versailles or in the Whitney’s stark modernist spaces. This isn’t easy: Koons is a man who gives a whole new meaning to the term lightweight.

It also isn’t cheap. Artnet tallied up the market value of the works in the Whitney exhibition, and arrived at a number somewhere north of half a billion dollars, and that represents just a fraction of Koons’s total output. (Almost every sculpture, for instance, comes in an edition of three, or five.) Yet: pretty much the best way to go bust in the art world, over the past couple of decades, has been by signing on as Jeff Koons’s dealer.

The reason is that these works aren’t just expensive in the auction house, mark-to-market sense of the term; they’re also incredibly expensive to manufacture. Koons is a technologist as much as he is an artist: he is personally responsible for the development of multiple cutting-edge fabrication techniques, and you can be quite sure that for every finished success, standing in glorious perfection in the middle of a gallerist’s white cube or being reflected in the glass curtain wall of some plutocrat’s skyscraper, there were a dozen failures along the way. Look at Koons’s Gorilla: he’s managed to recreate the texture and feeling of a cheap wax toy, in solid granite, and at awesome scale. This is, truly, folly: for nearly all of his career, Koons’s perfectionism has caused him to lose money on many if not most of the pieces he sells.




A man walks past a sculpture by Jeff Koons titled "Gorilla, 2009-11"

In the beginning, it was Koons personally who lost money. Even when he was doing something as simple as buying a Nike advertising poster and framing it, his desire for flawlessness caused the costs involved to spiral. Later on, Koons’s dealers bore the brunt, especially the long-suffering Jeffrey Deitch. But then, once he had driven at least three dealers into bankruptcy, Koons (re)discovered – and perfected – a whole new art: the art of selling to collectors objects which don’t actually exist. Over and over again.

Koons’s economic breakthrough – and such a breakthrough was desperately needed, if works like his magnificent Play-Doh were ever to be realized – was the kind of financial innovation worthy of Blythe Masters and Peter Hancock, the JP Morgan bankers who invented credit derivatives. Or, more to the point, it was an innovation worthy of Michael Dell, who became a billionaire by flipping the model of making computers and then selling them, into a model of selling computers and then making them.

Other sculptors, like Rodin, did something similar in the past: they would exhibit plaster or terracotta versions of their sculptures, which would then be commissioned in stone or in bronze and manufactured only after they had been paid for. But back then the only difficulty with fabrication was cost. Koons, by contrast, has for decades been selling sculptures he has no idea (at the time) how to make.

Play-Dohis the ultimate example of this. It was bought 20 years ago, by Los Angeles soap-opera magnate Bill Bell. But Play-Doh was – is – the opposite of a simple assembly-line sculpture. Koons was trying to do something which had never been done before – and he failed, and failed again, and failed again, and each time he picked himself up and kept on working at it.

Artist Jeff Koons (L) poses in front of his creation "Play-Doh" with Scott Rothkopf, the associate director of programs at the Whitney.

Which is where the real financial innovation comes in. Bell’s initial payment for Play-Doh might have covered the anticipated manufacturing costs, 20 years ago. But it didn’t come close to covering the cost of every single subsequent iteration, before the piece was finally perfected. So when costs started overrunning, Koons did something very clever indeed – he simply went back to his collectors, who had already bought and paid for the works in question, and asked them for more money.

At that point, the collectors had two choices. They could cough up – in the knowledge that Koons would almost certainly come back for even more, a few more steps down the road – or they could say no, and get their money back.

In any sensible art world, Koons’s financial innovation would never have worked. Let’s say that you’re willing to pay $20,000 for a work which costs $7,000 to fabricate. You pay the $20,000 up front, and are then told hey, we’ve had a massive cost overrun, please pay us another $20,000 or get your money back. You would just say thanks, I’ll have my money back. I was willing to pay $20,000, but I’m not willing to pay $40,000.

In the fevered upper echelons of the contemporary art market, however, values can soar overnight; artworks are bought at least in part for their speculative value; and the amount that someone is willing to pay for a piece is mostly a function of how much someone else is willing to pay for that same piece.

What Koons discovered was that so long as his work was rising in value, few collectors would give up a work they had bought at a lower price – even a work that didn’t exist. And if they did, no harm, no foul – there was always a long line of new collectors happy to step into their shoes. Koons, very cleverly, found a way of exploiting the mark-to-market mentality that is now ubiquitous in the art world: the way in which collectors are hyper-aware of how much their art is worth. So long as the collectors could credibly believe that they had “made money” on their non-existent art, they were generally happy to keep on funding it – in Bell’s case, for some 20 years.

Koons in front of Balloon Dog.

The Koons model is a little bit like the patronage model, where a wealthy patron will pay an artist’s expenses in return for his artistic output. But Koons flipped that model: he had the collectors working for him, more than the other way around. They weren’t calling the shots: he was. (One Koons collector told me recently that he once made the artist an offer: he’d pay double the asking price, if Koons guaranteed that he’d never come back and ask for more. No dice.)

Koons’s model only works, of course, in a commoditized art world where prices are constantly rising. But it does work – and it has even produced masterpieces like Play-Doh. No dealer could have afforded to fund the production of multiple such pieces, and so Koons developed not only brand-new fabrication techniques, but also brand-new funding techniques to keep his hugely expensive R&D machine running.

Look closely at the shiny surfaces of the massive sculptures in the Celebration series – the Balloon Dog, say – and you won’t see a single seam; you won’t see any visible evidence of how the piece was made. Look at the bronze and aluminum copies of blow-up toys, and you’ll swear you could just pop them with a pair of scissors. Koons’s trompe l’oeil is the very best the art world has ever seen, because of his incredible level of perfectionism. No one has done anything like it before, because the technology didn’t exist, and because the sums of money involved in creating such things are so mind-boggling.

Koons, more than any other artist, has embraced the new possibilities that open up when you can charge seven- or even eight-figure sums for a single piece: his art is like the new luxury apartment buildings going up in Manhattan, which only make financial sense once the residences inside can sell for more than $5,000 per square foot. Koons’s art might be empty; it might be banal. But Koons does something very interesting, which very few other artists do. He turns money into art, rather than just turning art into money.


Agreeably queasy … Koons's Michael Jackson and Bubbles,

[don]

Koons' Kinda Town

Field Notes From a Mirage

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

The scientists say
It will all wash away
But we don’t believe any more
Cause we’ve got our recruits
And our green mohair suits
So please show your I.D. at the door–

“Sin City,” Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman

The sidewalk is so hot the soles of shoes are melting, leaving faint footprint traces on the concrete. On this late June afternoon, the air temperature is 112 degrees in Las Vegas and considerably hotter down in the mirrored chasm of the Strip.

The merciless heat works its spell, luring the hordes into the cool labyrinths of the casinos, where even Ariadne could get lost amid the flashing neon, the hypnotic swells of electronica, the eerie moans of the losers at the tables.

Inside is right where they want you. That’s where your pockets get picked on high-tech slots (the funniest machine: KISS; the creepiest: the Joker, featuring video of Heath Ledger), Cirque du Soliel shows (at $155 a ticket) or extravagantly priced and barely digestible food prepared under the trademark of the omnipresent Mario Batali.

We came here for the American Library Association’s annual conference, where my wife Kimberly and her colleagues at Portland State University’s Millar Library are slated to receive a major award for innovation. After enduring the tedium of 1001 PowerPoint demonstrations on subjects like “Threshold Concepts” and the bibliographic perils of e-publishing, normally prim and sedate librarians are primed to cut loose for a week of licentious abandon in the desert. Las Vegas offers a celebration of the uniquely American version of the Id, a perpetually uncoiling knot of simulated desire with strobe lighting and a cheesy soundtrack.

What is a Threshold Concept, you inquire? Good question. I sat through a rather opaque and intellectually arid hour-and-a-half presentation by three leading practitioners of the theory and remained baffled, as did, I’d wager, many of the librarians in the hall. If you distill it down to essentials, a Threshold Concept seems very similar to what we used to call in philosophy seminars on the intractable (ahem) theories of Wittgenstein “getting a friggin’ clue.” But clarity is not the surest path to tenure.

The philosophy propelling this new trend in “knowledge management” is even more ominous than its mystifying nomenclature. In an age of Google, Edward Snowden and Wikipedia, some academic librarians feel that their tenuous position as gatekeepers of knowledge is under siege. The theory of Threshold Concepts seems to provide a last desperate shot for librarians to reassert their role as information power-brokers, herding naïve students and guileless library patrons toward “authoritative” and “credible” sources of news (such as the New York Times, naturally.) It’s the latest reactionary counter-attack on the man who swung a wrecking ball through the brittle pretensions of the profession’s old-guard: Michel Foucault. In In The Order of Things, Foucault exposed the repressive political engines driving the classification and regulation of knowledge and the arbiters of “worthy” texts have been on the run ever since. (More on this at a later date.)

Many of the 12,000 or so librarians who converged here during a week of pitiless summer sun seem displaced, wandering aimlessly down De Chirico-like corridors, looking at Google maps on their smartphones. Perhaps they are scanning the dreamscape for a bookstore. They will search in vain. Here the only books are kept by sports bookies, those exacting archivists of accounts that must be paid.

Kimberly and I set up camp in the Riviera, a bum choice on my part. I wanted to stay in the old Vegas, the sand-blasted city of mobsters and show girls, Howard Hughes and the honorable Dr. Thompson. That Vegas is long gone and the Riviera is a decaying relic of its passing. The crumbling hotel is wedged between vast parking lots on the north end of the Strip, across Las Vegas Boulevard from the even more decrepit Circus Circus, which resembles a sinister abandoned set from a slasher film.Behind the Riviera looms a stout white warehouse. On the side of the building in large red block lettering is writ: Indoor Skydiving. Think about it. Just another tantalizing episode of the Vegas alt reality show. Of course, most of the indoor skydiving in this city is done on the floors of the casinos.

The traffic on the Strip is dominated by a dizzying circuit of cabs and trucks hauling advertisements for shows by unknown magicians, and fading stars like Celine Dion, Olivia Newton-John and Rod Stewart, who seems intent on completing his 30-year-long arc of descent by becoming the town’s new Engelbert Humperdinck. But the most frequent mobile ads were for “Direct to You” prostitutes, “girls who really want to meet you.” These emaciated blondes all sport immaculately redesigned breasts and exquisitely polished nails on delicate feet that apparently leave behind quite heavy carbon footprints.

Nevada is fast becoming a Tea Party sanctuary, but Vegas remains a solidly union town of culinary, hotel and casino workers. But even this is beginning to change. You can see the future on the gaming floors of the Bellagio and the Venetian, where more and more operations are becoming automated. The real surprise for me was the number of virtual black jack tables, where dealer avatars with distracting cleavage run the games on widescreen monitors. The human players, perhaps conditioned to video gaming, sit silently at the tables, clinging to a desperate faith in the fairness of the casino’s poker algorithms.

On the plane from Portland, I sat next to an engineer who has been working for the last decade at Lake Mead. The reservoir is shriveling, drying up before our eyes. The water level drops each year, leaving a baleful white stain on the walls of Black Canyon. His company’s job is to paint the freshly exposed bone-white walls of the canyon back to their accustomed color, so as not to frighten the tourists.

Of course, it’s not the tourists who should be petrified by the dwindling of Lake Mead, but the moguls of the Strip. They are the retailers of illusion. The biggest Mirage in town isn’t the shimmering gilt-colored casino, with its topless poolside bar ($40 entry fee) and ghastly aquarium, but the illusion of water. Slotted on the desiccated basin floor of the Mojave, Las Vegas is moistened by less than four inches of rain a year. That’s the old average. The future looks even drier. Yet there is water everywhere on the strip: the vast pools of Caesar’s Palace, the waterfalls at the Wynn, the gondola-festooned lagoons of the Venetian, the dancing fountain at the Bellagio. The biggest illusion, the one that must be maintained at all costs, is that in Vegas there are no limits.

Over the course of the last 30 years, Vegas has been transformed from Sin City to a family theme park to an unapologetic advertisement for boundless gluttony. You can thank Steve Wynn for this grotesque metamorphosis, the man who punched his elbow through Picasso’s “Le Rêve” while showing off his most celebrated possession to friends. Wynn later unloaded the re-stitched painting of a masturbating woman for $154 million on his noxious pal Stephen A. Cohen, the billionaire hedge funder whose SAC firm is perennially under investigation for insider trading.

Wynn made his mark running bingo parlors in Maryland. In the early 1970s, he came to Vegas and made a speculative land deal with Howard Hughes, which netted him a few million and controlling interest in the Golden Sands, where he lured Frank Sinatra and his entourage. The game changer occurred in 1989 when Wynne opened the first mega-resort casino on the new Strip, the Mirage, a 3,000 room Polynesian-themed gilded palace of sin with an erupting volcano. The construction of the Mirage was financed by another master of illusion, junk bond king Michael Milken. Treasure Island and the Bellagio, at the time the most expensive hotel ever built, soon followed.

In 2005, when Wynn opened his towering 650-foot tall luxury resort hotel and casino on the north side of the Strip he said he had wanted to call it Le Rêve. In the end, he opted for something a little less exotic: the Wynn. The décor of the Wynn (and it’s twin curving bronze tower the Encore) is a wispy simulacrum of oriental opulence, designed to excite the sensibilities of Saudi princes on the prowl, Russian oligarchs with millions to burn in a weekend, and the Kardashian brood. In elegant harmony with this theme, the resort boasts two iridescent sculptures (Popeye and Tulips) by the master of tasteless triviality: Jeff Koons. It struck me that basement of the Wynn is the perfect tomb for Koons’ moronic confections.

In the end, Wynne lent the name of the Picasso painting to a popular permanent show at his resort. Le Rêve (curiously translated as ‘A’ Dream) is a kind of aquatic Tempest, featuring bald men making dare-devil dives in Speedos, frisky Flappers splashing in platinum blond wigs, and synchronized swimmers flashing red stilettos. In other words, yes, a wet dream.

But the dream is coming to an end. A reckoning is coming. The water is running out. Today 90 percent of the city’s water is sucked from Lake Mead and Lake Mead is drying up. The latest forecasts predict the once vast reservoir may be completely tapped out by 2021. Count ‘em: That’s seven years. After that, all bets are off. No water tunnels or emergency pipelines can possibly compensate for the shortage. Vegas’s days are numbered. Deal with it, baby.

Sitting at a bar inside the Luxor’s dark pyramid, watching a feisty Algerian team push the haughty German squad to the brink of elimination in the World Cup, I struck up a conversation with a Mexican-American man who works down in the canyon. His company performs a macabre service. They fish out the bodies of the jumpers, Vegas’s losers, the victims of the gaming tables, the aging strippers and hookers, the dead-enders, those who have maxed out, those who have reached their last threshold and take a leap off the new Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, sky diving into the Colorado River, 840 feet below.

“We snag four or five bodies a month,” he tells me, as he tosses back his third Jack and Coke of the afternoon. “Vegas is still a hard town. Eventually your luck is going to run dry. Know what I mean?”