THE PRETEND ARTIST
How to hate Jeff Koons like the artworld's in crowd
by KOD Staff
The man every critic loves to hate, Jeff Koons is arguably the biggest artist in the world right now. He holds the title of 'World's most Expensive Living Artist' and his solo show at The Whitney has people queuing for hours on East Seventy-fifth Street. But from The New Yorker to The Independant, Jerry Saltz to Vice, people struggle to find good things to say about the King of Contemporary Art. So if you can't face the crowds, or just can't face his artworks, we've pulled together some quotes to help you criticize 'Jeff Koons: A Retrospective' without ever having to step inside The Whitney Museum of American Art.
‘Pretend Jeff Koons is an artist. Not a happy hotshot in a suit, serving crystal meth to big-game-buying mega collectors and auction houses’
- Jerry Saltz, Vulture.com, 2013
‘Warhol ennobled the consumer product; Koons is in the business of making the ultimate luxury bauble.’
- Ariella Budick, Financial Times, 2014
‘Is Jeff Koons having a laugh?’
- Lucy Davies, The Telegraph, 2012
‘Why Koons insistently produces immense paintings of montaged images beggars comprehension. They’re boring.’
- Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 2014
‘It seems utterly preposterous, almost beyond the most absurd critical joke, that anyone should take this stuff seriously at all, or have the gall to stick the label of art on it.’
- The Independent, 2009
![‘Should we expect any surprizes from the Koons show? No… [he has] been flaccid and overrated for years’ - Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergenic, 2014](http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0200/7124/files/koons_7_grande.jpg?33407)
‘Should we expect any surprizes from the Koons show? No… [he has] been flaccid and overrated for years’
- Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergenic, 2014
‘Koons has become superrich making high-gloss, programmatically brainless ornaments for rich people’
- Ben Davis, Slate.com, 2013
‘Forever an egotistical megalomaniac, Koons is obsessed with himself, this inflated self-importance has overstretched all sensible values, reaching the point of no return’
- Artlyst, 2011
‘Just when it looked as if the ‘80s were over, Jeff Koons has provided one last pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting trype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the decade’
- Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 1991
‘Why won’t Jeff Koons leave us alone?’
- Bob Nickas, Vice, 2012
‘In short: Jeff Koons is famous and his art is expensive’
- Kathryn Tully, Forbes, 2014
