A nobody dissects the big leagues

I have been trying to put my finger on what it is that keeps us all coming back to some of the biggest names in art, the powerhouses that are Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Damien Hirst. Personally, I find that the things that bore, repulse, and irritate me the most are typically those that provide hours of layers to peel back and think about. They, the things that repel, have the most sustenance because they ask a bold question. It’s just that sometimes a question perhaps didn’t need to be asked. Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Damien Hirst ask a question about art that was so specifically niche and arty, a question so informed by the nihilistic, money obsessed, what-about-ism that only the most irritatingly heady and goading person would bother to ask, that I wonder how it has garnered so much validation. The fact that we exist in an art canon that would even beget these questions (that is, what is the answer to the question of what makes for the most popular art, and is the most popular art the best art?) is sort of shameful. It’s an ugly reflection of how debased things can get when you scratch away at something shallow. These aren’t the peices that move us, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need them.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it’s dirty work, asking these questions, but the asking is what conjures the work. Couldn’t we have just skipped the whole ordeal? Did we need someone to take that question to its ultimate conclusion? And are they a genius for taking that path? Or a saint for making that sacrifice?

Really, to take something so circular for a walk is to come back to the self same spot we started from. What is modern art? What is it for? What do these intelectual persuits in the visual spectrum describe about people today? What do they serve, and who? What is the end game? How do galleries disrrupt or reroute the trajectory of this persuit? Who cares? What does that have to do with anything else? (I like to think its an interplay between modern psychotheraputic analysis, and capitalism, and individualism, and a lack of real spirituality)

I guess some art is about life, and some art is about art, and some art is about both. This art is about art, and the artist. The perverse thing that these three artists remind me of, is that art has become something that can elevate a single person to the status of genius, but art is more profound and less reductive when it is practiced and participated in by a mass of people that create a culture. It adds insult to injury that these three people dont fabricate the work themselves. Its a far cry from the human impulse that drives us to create. A sculpture of a pop star and his pet monkey is nay a cry to the universe to syncopate our heartbeats with vibrations made and shared around a fire (drum circles).

This trifecta of wildly successful western male artists spent their precious lives reaching the answer. They aren’t any poorer for it, but I wonder, are they so incredibly bereft of an inner life, of a pressing desire to find the answers to life’s deeper questions, that this was all they wanted to ask about? How did their work impact, and worsen, the drive to be a singular artists, doing a singular thing, with the end goal of adding more digits to their net worth? Is this a service to art, or a disservice?

What we know know from these investigations, is that there is a code, and it can be cracked. That answer is demanded specifially by a society with no spirituality, or a spirituality of/around money. In their own soul searching, hoping to satiate the ego borne of this art star celebrity culture, we find ourselves all implicated in these three peoples psychological journey. The real spectacle is that they were able to get so much of the world involved and invested in their quest to satiate themselves in their desire to be talked about, thought about, known, aknowledged. It’s wildly absurd.

When you have to find some conclusive answer to a monolithic question about a human enterprise, the answer is always terrible. At least it seems that way to me, as so much of the conversation around capitailsm today points out how we elevate man and his invented spirituality, but that brings us farther and farther away from life unanalysed, lived, and felt naturally. When our investigation becomes an interrogation, we can’t find an infinite chamber of unfolding lotus flowers, rather we find a tapiring spiral of logic that ends in a black hole. When we isolate art to individuals and valuate their work, and aritsts take that on explicitely, I think this is the work you get.

But why do Jeff Koons and Damien Hurst go on naming it, now that they have so empirically named it, given it shape, and gotten their names as far and wide as they can? Why can’t they just George Bush themselves into obscurity, unironically making awful paintings in the corner, having had enough? Their point has been made, hasn’t it? It churns the stomach to know that it’s because the public hasn’t had enough, and they wont until the acquisition value is gone.

(See below: an actual George Bush painting)

They make us question the whole institution of art. But doing something honest and personal wasn’t good enough for them, and really, now we know that wouldn’t have been good enough for any kind of mass hysteria that the stuff theyre making now generates. They had to make something so unrrelated to human emotion, life experience, and questions about existence that it didn’t mean anything, and, inexplicably, it was wildly successful.

On a personal level, the fact that popular art could be so completely out of pocket, meaningless, and pointlessly provocative really threw me off for a long time. The fact that it was some of the most popular art? Completely confounding. What was I not seeing that everyone else saw?

(See: Kris Jenner with a Jeff Koons on her bookshelf)

Thinking about these artists, I oscillate between feelings of inadequacy, hating myself for some perceived pick-me-ism, and genuine awe. When an artist has advanced themselves to a position so high as to be regarded as run of the mill universal pop culture, they become so ingrained that to reject them is socially unacceptable. It reflects poorly on the hater as a snob, because it places everyone else on the opposite side of the venn diagram as a plebian, and everyone else falls in the middle, as people who would take a selfie with the work. To me, thats the worst part of the venn diagram to fall into, because the working is mocking popular art, and anyone who protects, elevates, or celebrates it. In this way, it belittles anyone who encounters it.

Thats just how pop culture works.

(Pictured: a woman in a Trump 2024 t-shirt photographed with a famous Koons sculpture of Michael Jackson with his pet monkey, bubbles as photographed by this artist)

(pictured: Damien Hirsts skull sculpture: ‘For The Love of God’, a solid platinum replica of a human skull crusted with diamonds that took £12 million to fabricate, which he had to finance by selling 1/3 to an investment banking group. Photo courtesy of the Daily Telegraph )

Pictured: Andy Warhol holding a camera dispensing a picture of his own likeness. Photograph: Oliviero Toscani/Art Gallery of South Australia)

The nature of popular culture and attention drives me crazy. I know that I will have acheived some level of enlightenment when I come to accept the parts of human nature that determine the direction of our collective attention. Its something artists have to contend with, unless they are one of those artists that denounces such things and just makes what they want to make.

I think each of these artists came to it with a slightly different approach. In Andy Warhols case, he literally replicated pop culture. He took what people were already paying attention to, and just changed it slightly, and reproduced it around 10,000 times(literally), at his studio, The Factory. He certainly was a genius. He basically invented the notion of celebrity as we see it now, and predicted social media in saing that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. He was wearing leather jackets and striped shirts and jeans before anyone else, he invented the bad boy artist thing. He created a little cult and chose sidekicks to up his glamour. And he totally manipulated and abused those people, and ran them into the ground, and disposed of them when he had used them sudficiently. He hated himself, and it was so deep, that he had create this career for himself to combat his convistion of his own worthlessness. I dont think the peices themselves are the point, its the enterprise, the glamour, the story of what he did, that is compelling, and thats strange, because before him, art was an object. I mean, it wa s acareer too, we dont really have one hit wonders in the visual art world. But he wasn’t even making original objects, Andy Warhol didn’t INVENT bananas. And we don’t know anything about him by looking at his bananas. His identity, personality, and body of work was an altar ego that he hid behind, and behind that was a pretty insecure guy.

Despite that, his self hatred is there, his desire for proximity to fame is there, and his apt prediction of the modern predicament of our obsessive narcissism is there. You just have to know where to look.

The apple doesnt fall far from the tree with Jeff Koons (see: Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture). Jeff Koons was a wall street guy before he started bossing fabricators around. He is more famous for his Balloon Dog, or his huge outdoor installation of a puppy made from flowers (I don’t understand why people love that one so much). My favorite works of his are the pornographic pictures of he and his wife Ilona Staller from the 80’s, which is to say that sometimes he actually asks a sincere question of the art world(where does art end and porn begin?). But for the most part, I think he just took notes on what Andy Warhol did and saw an opportunity to be rich without competing with the other wall street guys. Maybe art seemed like fish in a barrel compared to that. Compared to Andy Warhol, a gay guy from Pittsburg with a super religious mama, I dont think that Jeff Koons had that same internal struggle. He is a pretty standard hot white guy, and also hails from Pennsylvania. He made reproductions of classical paintings for his dads furniture store, and did go to art school, but he eventually became a successful broker. So, like, he did also want to be an artist, it just doesnt seem like he had to sturggle with the same self acceptance that Andy Warhol did, so much as the standard fare of trying to get noticed and find success in the art world. I suspect that he was able to devise some structures for financing his work via his brokering career, which made his excessively polished work possible. I do know that in the beginning of his career, he sold things for less than his fabrication costs, which tells me that from the get out, he knew how the game worked, and his ego was never at stake. His work is just so…big, male, shiny, and polished, theres nothing human about it at all.

Enter Damien Hirst, a member of the young british artists displayed at Sensations, a Saatchi gallery show in the early nineties that put him on the map. I think Damien Hirst got picked up so young, and was marshalled as an artist before he had to start devising ways to strategically manipulate the public. Because he never went through that stage of desperation begetting invention, he just feels good about himself and what he’s doing. This is what happens when artusts dont go through that essential stage of suffering. Theres no neuroticism. He never developes a schtick. And because his works aren’t about himself, or his lived experience, and he’s also not putting on an act to mock the art world, he really just seems to feel like he deserves what he has, which is completely illogical.

He is just himself in public, in interviews, and in his work, which seeks to constantly top itself in terms of being a publicity stunt. That’s about all his work does. I really dont think there is much else to say about it honestly, the questions it begs are not very deep, and they arent questions that only his work asks (for example, is it permissible to kill an animal for any reason other than sustenance or products? Or, what is the most expensive thing ever produced, and what are the implications of doing so?) He seeks to bring things to their ultimate conclusion, and it just kind of brings to mind Jackass. It’s antics.

So there you go, thats my thoughts on those three white dudes we just cant stop giving money and attention to, because everything else would be too DEI for the MOMA.