Jeff Koons

Calling a Koons a Koons

Little Mermaid Koons {poetics lab simulation]

 Allegorical micturition has swept
the guest halls of the art galleries
and the undermasses
wail in the background to iambic
beat. Sludge is proclaimed sludge,
hairdos hors d’oeuvres, as the soiled
face of inverted cardioerasty—a.k.a.
genital fetish—rears its mushy brow.
––from “Ambliopia” in The Sophist (1987)

 The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art is to big art shows what The Little Mermaid is to big Broadway musicals: bright, breezy, and tuneless. Koons's art is a product of the Disnification of Warhol (and decidedly not the other way around). The show is worthwhile seeing as a monument to the most commercially successful aspects of the New York art market. As with the proverbial  restaurant, with food shot up with MSG, you leave the show aesthetically hungry.

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