Koons: Most Successful American Artist
On the occasion of the Jeff Koons exhibition, at the Whitney, and two gallery shows, at Zwirner and Gagosian, let me share what Carl Swanson wrote in a recent New York magazine piece: ‘Koons is, by the measure of sales of new work, which is the money-mad art world’s only objective measure, the most successful living American artist, but he has never before had a museum retrospective in New York, his home base for 36 years. And it’s clear that, for him, one is not enough. “Even though the Whitney has given me the Breuer building, there still isn’t that much space,†he says, explaining why he’s staging these two simultaneous shows after such a long hiatus…[But] what’s new in the Gagosian and Zwirner shows is that he’s trying to place himself in art history—quite literally, by placing art history in his work—dragging classical statues onto the canvas or casting them in plaster. His references this time are Picasso and Praxiteles.’
