The Beginning of Jeff Koons’ Art Controversy
It all began in 1989, when via an invitation by the Whitney Museum, and guest curator Marvin Heiferman, Jeff Koons created a piece focused on media for a billboard for the exhibition “Image World: Art and Media Culture.” Koons’ billboard promoted a fictional film named Made in Heaven. Koons and his then-spouse Ilona Staller (Cicciolina) modelled for a series of photographs describing their marital congress. Made in Heaven (1990–1991) quickly stood in between the intersection of art and sexuality.
More pieces, which were made between 1989 and 1992, titled ‘Dirty Ejaculation’ and ‘Ilona’s Asshole,’ were displayed at the Sonnabend Gallery, in New York. The images were large and grainy, printed on canvas, alongside glassworks and sculptures. An analysis of the project’s art style reveals an influence of Baroque and Rococo art movements. He infamously cited being inspired by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, Gustave Courbet, and Édouard Manet.
Courtesy – TASCHEN
The kitsch art made rounds at the 1990 Venice Biennale. By 1994, the couple had separated and Koons destroyed much of the artwork after Ilona Staller took their son Ludwig with her to Italy. To his own accord, they were “Adam and Eve.” And who wouldn’t be disheartened with this immaculate estrangement? The pictures made around amongst the art circles, yet again, when after 20 years Luxembourg & Dayan decided to showcase its redux version.
Art and Sexuality – A Kitschy Affair
When talking to Andrew Anthony of the Guardian, he noted “If I think of the word beauty, I think of the word vagina… or the ass.” Jeff Koons considered the art produced by the couple’s dalliance as one of his greatest. However, many remained unaroused by the photographs, glasswork, and the billboard.
Michael Kimmelman, an art critic for the Times, called these reproductions “cheap” and Koons “an opportunistic publicity monger whose conflation of himself and his work precipitated the self-destruction that already seems [his] fate.” To his own accord,
Courtesy – Jeff Koons
The Made in Heaven series was perhaps, Koons’ unctuous challenge to the traditional values of painting and photography. It seems as if Koons utilized pornography as a marketing strategy for his concept of image creation in the global market. In another sense, you could argue that Koons’s narcissistic voyeurism reflects a psycho-social dimension of his artistry as if he is attempting to mask a concealed youthful fantasy behind a veil of divine illusion. Although sex is rarely examined through a critical lens, it inevitably becomes an almost scandalous, if not enticing, point of interest.
Yet Another Art Controversy
To this day, this work is considered the pinnacle of art controversy in his career. It was hit with another lawsuit, when the set designer Michael Hayden, who designed sets and props for Illona Staller, during her adult career sued Jeff Koons for using a large sculptural piece depicting a slithering serpent, coiled around the rock pedestal for his photographic paintings.
Courtesy – Jeff Koons
However, the kitschy art king has successfully persuaded federal judge, Timothy Reif in Manhattan to dismiss the copyright lawsuit brought against him. In Reif’s decree, he stated that the set designer had waited too long to initiate his lawsuit [in 2021], as the purported infringement occurred many years ago, and the statute only allows just three years for a complaint to be lodged.
Image – Made in Heaven. Courtesy – Jeff Koons
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