The Jeff Koons Retrospective at Chicago’s MCA Raises the Question of Koons’s Importance

No other artist is so beloved by the market and bemoaned by the critics. But Peter Schjedahl reviewing the exhibit in this week’s New Yorker doesn’t take the easy way out:

Koons is hugely significant—grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death—while finally signifying precious little. That’s my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark.

. . .

Koons’s uncannily mediocre paintings suggest an insensibility in two dimensions that is as amazing, in its way, as his genius in three.

. . .

[Hanging Heart] apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste.

Funhouse (The New Yorker)