The Blooming Beast

July 3, 2000 P. 74

July 3, 2000 P. 74

The New Yorker, July 3, 2000 P. 74

THE ART WORLD about Jeff Koons and his “Puppy”... Writer tells about seeing "Puppy" for the first time, and how it spat on Documenta, a nearby annual art show Koons had been banned from... That should have been Koons’s shining hour, when, at the age of thirty-seven, he began to reach his goal of becoming the Beatles of art: agent and symbol of sophisticated innovation in synch with mass appeal. But he more nearly proved to be art’s second-actless Orson Welles... Koons’s own hubris—in the form of a manic, terrible show in 1991 that solemnized his collaboration with and brief marriage to the Hungarian-Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina—caused his downfall. Winsome images of hard-core sex, meant to draw everybody into the enchanted circle of the couple’s exemplary bliss, grossed almost everybody out... So the triumphal entry of “Puppy” into Manhattan feels displaced in time. The piece won’t blow New York away, and not just because nothing non-nuclear can ever do that. In this distracted era, even the creation of a second floral colossus is unlikely to resuscitate Koons’s lost momentum. I miss the pleasures of a long, unobstructed approach to a “Puppy” that was plunked on the common ground—a situation that incidentally enabled the old near-and-far dance with which, for example, we are solemnly taught to appreciate Monet. (This is, hands down, the most richly and subtly painterly sculpture ever made—and without a drop of paint.) As it is, one has only the options of a distant, heroic view from head on and a close encounter from the side. But that’s O.K. The joy of the blooming beast is equal to anything short of a hard frost.

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