Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Great Artists in Their Own Words TV - Tim Marlow TV - Jeff Koons - Jeff Koons: A Man of Trust TV - Jeff Koons: Beyond Heaven TV - Tom Ford on Jeff Koons TV - Amy Dempsey - Mark Stevens - Michael Kimmelman - Robert Hughes - Matthew Collings TV - Alan Yentob: Imagine TV -
Anyone could make it ... The artist who most perfectly captured that idea was Jeff Koons ... His work has since commanded some of the highest prices of any living artist. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America: What Lies Beneath 3/3, BBC 2011
For the past thirty years Jeff Koons has cultivated a reputation for pushing taste to the limit. Great Artists in Their Own Words III: But is it Art? 1976-1993, BBC 2013
One Ball 50/50 Tank (Spalding Dr J Silver Series) 1985: Jeff Koons. Tim Marlow on ... British Sculpture 2011
I don’t believe in kitsch. Jeff Koons
Art can be a terrible discriminator. It tries to make people feel guilt and shame about their cultural past. Jeff Koons: A Man of Trust, 2003
I believe in the empowerment of art because it can be so flexible. ibid. Koons
I like art that seduces. ibid.
I have had a desire to make things that people enjoy. Jeff Koons: Beyond Heaven, Koons, 2009
The reaction to the Made in Heaven work was something that I really didn’t expect. ibid.
The amazing thing about art is that it can empower. ibid.
The art happens within them. ibid.
I wanted to do a portrait on Jeff Koons ... A bit of an enigma. Tom Ford on Jeff Koons: Iconoclasts, Sky Arts 2013
Something disturbing about his work. ibid.
An awesome presence... a massive durable monument. Amy Dempsey, re Koons’ Balloon Dog
Decadent artist lacks the imaginative will to do more than trivialize and italicise his themes and the tradition in which he works ... He is another of those who serve the tacky rich. Mark Stevens, The New Republic
One last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the 1980s ... artificial ... cheap ... unabashedly cynical. Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times
An extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he’s Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him. Robert Hughes, ‘Showbiz and the Art World’, The Guardian 30th June 2004
All of Koons’s best art – the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century’s signature work of simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory – has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. Jerry Saltz
Jeff Koons: An artist who stands as a giant at the gates of now with his back to the past, always positive, never anxious. And this is his workshop. In the ’80s he saw banality everywhere and thought it should be embraced. Matthew Collings, This is Modern Art VI: The Shock of the Now, BBC 1999
Koons’s giant puppy made of flowers as big as a five-storey building. ibid.
‘Art can change your life. It can expand your parameters. It can give this vastness to life.’ Alan Yentob, Imagine … Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer, BBC 2015
Jeff Koons’ first major retrospective is now travelling Europe, but it started here in New York. It’s the first time the Whitney has given over the whole museum to a single artist. ibid.
But there’s something unsettling in the work. ibid.
Jeff Koons’ vast New York studio down by the river in Chelsea is a step on from his father’s store. It employs over a 100 people who work according to his very precise instructions. ibid.
The gamble, the persistence, paid off. ibid.