JEFF KOONS | An Exclusive Interview

An Exclusive Interview With JEFF KOONS
By Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar

The desire to participate | Jeff Koons dialoguing with Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar about art, life, and generosity.

“If you open yourself up to the aesthetic, you can receive certain sensations from art, and those sensations are then the foundation for the creation of ideas.” – Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons, one of the most successful artists globally, a ‘Rock Star’ of contemporary art. He is a former Wall Street commodities trader who left the financial world to pursue his dream of becoming an artist; he is one of the most influential artists with fans like Lady Gaga. His art is unique and has featured balloon dogs, lobsters, Pink swans, and even cracked eggs. Koons’ stainless steel sculpture, Balloon Dog (Orange), was sold at an auction for $58.4m, turning him into the most expensive living artist of all time.
Jeff Koons talks to Art Market Magazine to discuss his work, his future, and about generosity.

Across continents, a meeting takes place, and I am very excited to be speaking to Jeff Koons, one of the most influential artists living today. As we deepen our conversation, I find myself inspired by his clarity of vision and grounded curiosity. Jeff generously shares his beliefs and memories, horizon and motivation, and Art Market magazine, and I am delighted to share this interview with you now.

Art Market Magazine: Hello Jeff, Thank you for the interview.  So, after all these years of creating – are you still hungry?

Jeff Koons:  Yes, I am still very hungry. I’ve always enjoyed art because it allows me to become; it lets everybody become. That’s the beautiful thing, to continue to increase your parameters as an individual, and at the same time then to share that with the community around you. More than ever, I want to continue exercising my freedom as a human being to reach the highest state of enlightenment possible and exercise that freedom.

Art Market Magazine: You are speaking in spiritual terms.

Jeff Koons:   I am speaking in transcendent terms, but spiritual in that to enjoy life and reach a potential, to experience a vastness and enjoyment to its highest level, to enjoy abstraction, and to enjoy an understanding of the situation that one’s placed into its highest level of consciousness and understanding. 

Art Market Magazine: Your outlook of the artist’s position is very playful and soulful.

Jeff Koons:  What I’ve always tried to do is to make work that automatically is inclusive, and that it shows that nobody has to bring anything to the table other than themselves at that moment and that everything is about this moment forward. I am interested in making no judgments that there is complete acceptance, there is no discrimination, and that everything is in play. As soon as you make judgments, you discriminate. You remove things from being possible to the interaction between your ideas or within the possibilities of incorporating them. I believe that the artistic act is one that takes you from self-acceptance to the acceptance of others. And once you learn to accept yourself, you enjoy finding interest in things outside of yourself.

Art Market Magazine: But how do you manage to maintain such edge of curiosity and openness when you have become an icon, expected to answer to the iconic image of Jeff Koons?

Jeff Koons:  I keep everything in play. So when I walk down the street, I keep every image, every object, everything I try to look at as interesting and as a possibility to be part of a dialogue, make connections with other things, or function in some aspect of polarity to something else. And I find this by just embracing life – I have a family, I have a total of eight children, I love my family life. I love the idea of exploring the world and sharing that opportunity with family and community, the people around you. For me, it is all about trying to reach higher possibilities. When you practice that, you automatically want to share that with the community around you. 

Art Market Magazine:  It sounds that you are phrasing art as a practice of expansion of consciousness.

Jeff Koons:  I remember my first day of art school and the first lesson in art history. When my teacher brought up an image of Manet and started speaking about the painting, it was Olympia and started to speak about the different symbolism taking place and the different connections within 19th-century Parisian society, I realized that art so effortlessly connects you to all the other human disciplines. It connects us to psychology, philosophy, sociology, physics, aesthetics – all the human disciplines, so effortlessly. And I felt so lucky that I was involved or had an interest in an activity that, up to that moment, I had no concept of what the power of this activity could be or where it could lead me. And the sense of expansion – that I could be involved and have such a vast life through this activity – hit me at that moment, and I have continued to enjoy that expansion and the pleasure of this involvement in all the human disciplines through this central core of art.

Art Market Magazine: Can you speak about the dialogue between the aesthetic and the communicative?

Jeff Koons: I have always enjoyed, when I came into contact with personal iconography, that art could make you feel a certain way. If you open yourself up to the aesthetic, you can receive certain sensations from art, and those sensations are then the foundation for the creation of ideas. Because feelings create ideas, and this is the journey that I’ve enjoyed, I wanted to be part of my generation and have a dialogue within the world because I always wanted to participate. I enjoyed the dialogues, I enjoyed the investigations of so many other people in different areas of art, but to be able to participate and have an association, a connection with people like Dali, Picabia, Duchamp, Manet, Courbet, all the way back, Leonardo, Praxiteles – everybody. It is that joy of giving it up and finding something greater outside the self. This type of pleasure comes from the interaction of observing art and the contemplation of it, which can be both physical and intellectual.

Art Market Magazine: This is probably the aspiration of most people who create. I am thinking of the tension between that desire and the state of struggle that most artists are experiencing. Can you say something about this struggle?

Jeff Koons: People are pushing themselves, wanting to have a vast experience or to try to reach their limits, both physically and intellectually, within the world. As a young person, there were many struggles that I faced, there was a lot of rejection that I faced, but my interest was to go in a direction where I received enjoyment and pleasure from my work, and that it was a vehicle to let me continue to become. Then I could share and have a dialogue with my community about these ideas. That is what is important. That type of struggle is an ongoing struggle; it is one that you will always want to continue to increase the parameters.

Art Market Magazine: So who are you becoming now? Where are you heading?

Jeff Koons: I am still myself; I am older. I am reflecting on the world and looking at my own mortality; I am looking at trying to be the best father that I can be – my children range from the age of forty down to the age of three, trying to be a great husband. And I also try to be a wonderful artist, an artist who is at least trying to his limits to be as generous as possible and fully realize my possibilities of practicing my art to the highest level and setting an example in my community. And that’s all that you can do as a human being, to try and reach your potential.

Art Market Magazine: I really like your emphasis on generosity, finding it very rare in our culture. What inspired you to position yourself like that?

Jeff Koons: Family is first and foremost informing someone, and the environment I grew up in: my parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles, observing them and the world and seeing them trying to participate and be effective within the community. My father and mother, my grandparents, and my uncles and aunts were ambitious. They enjoyed life, but they also enjoyed their participation. My grandfather was city treasurer in York. All my uncles were merchants, and they would interact with people. They loved people and enjoyed the company of others, which gave me the inspiration to want to participate and be involved in a community and the art world. It was vast for me to connect with Dali because he was an artist who dealt with diving into the individual’s internal life. Through Dada and Surrealism, I learned personal iconography. Still, I wanted to go outside myself at a certain point, so artists like Duchamp and Picabia were a tremendous vehicle. The idea of the ready-made was a wonderful metaphor for getting outside of myself and finding interest in the outside world. When you work with objects that are representative of the outside world, it’s all metaphor for people. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the acceptance of others, that is the objective of art; that is the highest stage of being – the acceptance of others.

Art Market Magazine: When you look back at the art you’ve made at the beginning of your career, are you able to extend such acceptance and kindness to yourself? 

Jeff Koons: I see the dialogue taking place. I see the development of the dialogue. If I look at my earliest works, I see the excitement of the senses, the joy of being alive, and the joy of interacting with the viewer – that the viewer realizes that this is about them – it’s about their transcendence, it is about their possibilities. I enjoy looking and seeing the use of materials and reflections of different vehicles to continue and communicate philosophical ideas about being and about becoming and sharing the possibility of transcendence. This transcendence is about the viewer; it is about their interests and about what they can become. I am participating in my own transcendence by doing the work that is functioning as some type of displaying mechanism – but it’s about the viewer’s response to that, the sharing of that information.

Art Market Magazine: You are an icon for providing objects of transcendence. Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Jeff Koons: I perform as an artist very intuitively, so I am always open to everything around me, and over a period of time and generally it’s a process that takes place over a two-year time period, at least, I’m looking at things and deciding what is really of interest to me, and I follow those interests then, and I focus on this interest and that always takes me to a very metaphysical place – where I’m in the moment and at the same time connected to the eternal and to the universal, and that’s when I decide to make something. This is what I really have an interest in.

Art Market Magazine: That’s beautiful, thank you. How do you integrate it with media and advertisement?

Jeff Koons: Media and advertising are a little bit like patting your head and rubbing your hand on your stomach at the same time, it’s a little bit about coordination, but it’s not the joy and the pleasure of art. It’s about assuming the responsibility to try to do your work, make it to the highest level, and communicate these ideas with the public. But it is not what the work is about, but it is almost a responsibility than to the community…

I think there’s a responsibility to exercise freedom and try to be a role model for other people because of their attention. They have an interest in what you’re doing; I think that you want to be able to continue to meet their expectations, just as you want to meet your own; you want to exercise your own expectations. I have no problem in taking my work in any direction that I want to and am constantly changing direction, it is not about the expectation of that direction, but it is to connect. I think that if people enjoy my work, they enjoy a certain connection to a relevant way of looking at the world, looking at the power and the possibility of the individual, and the physical and the intellectual combined.

Art Market Magazine: Is this part of the reason you’ve collaborated a lot (e.g., with Lady Gaga and Nike)? What was your motivation for collaborating?

Jeff Koons: The motivations would be to be engaged with the world around me, to be open to ideas and interactions with people and with an audience, so that a new audience could come to the work. But I think that an artist is really at their optimum power when they are just focusing on their dialogue, which is completely controlled and involved with their own work; there doesn’t have to be any compromise in any manner. That is the most wonderful thing. That is what really divides art from design – there is no goal or objective.

Art Market Magazine: Art could be in and by itself.

Jeff Koons: Yes. I am free to make anything, and that’s what I do – I do make anything that I want.

Art Market Magazine: How fortunate to be there. But it also took time to get there, and if you could speak with the younger Jeff, at the beginning of his career or perhaps with other emerging artists – what would you say to him, what would you advise them? 

Jeff Koons: That everything is about the desire to participate. If you really do want to participate with the world around you, with the community around you, if you’re young – your generation – you will be given the opportunity. The world and your community are looking for people who want to participate and who desire to go to their limitations to the best of their ability. 

And you will be given the opportunity. As far as the creative process, the only thing that I’ve ever been able to realize that you can do as an artist to create art, the method is just to follow your interests. And you really cannot do anything other than that. You cannot follow someone else’s interests. So whatever captivates you, if you just follow those interests and you focus on those interests, it will always take you to this very metaphysical place. It doesn’t fail, it connects you to the universal, and that’s where time and space bend, and you could be in a dialogue with this moment and with the ancient and have your foot in the future too. It never fails. It’s like starting up an old car. If you’re a young artist and just started art school, you go home for a summer vacation, and you’re not making many artworks. When you come back to school, and you start to paint again, well, it is a little rough, it doesn’t flow so well, it is like starting an old car, trying to crank it up, but then when you continue to focus on it – all of a sudden it starts to flow, and the oil starts moving through the engine, and it starts to turn over and then it’s running, and it is like: O.K., here we go.

Art Market Magazine: To conclude our conversation, is there anything else you would like to share? Anything that’s important for you right now?

Jeff Koons: I love art. I was just at the Metropolitan Museum this morning and was looking at the collection. I happened to be looking at the Greek and Roman works. You can get so lost in work and realize that the dialogue is defining the highest level of being. They knew how to get the vastness, the most out of life possible, connect with the body and connect with abstraction and the mind, and have the greatest sense of fullness and enjoyment and pleasure and potential in life. It doesn’t change. 

That dialogue is as rich today as it was in Hellenistic times. And in the future, people can look at the work and can be striving in their own life to have this vastness. So we always have this potential, this opportunity to find real meaning in life.

Art Market Magazine: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to speak to you.

Jeff Koons: Thank you. 

Read the full article on Art Market Magazine. The GOLD LIST.
Top Contemporary Artists of Today!