Thirty years ago, 60 minutes ran a infamous segment about the popular art of the time and the outrageous prices people were paying for it. At the center of the story was Jeff Koons, whose sculpture of three basketballs suspended in an aquarium had just sold at Sotheby’s for $150,000.
The segment’s host, famed correspondent Morley Safer, was unimpressed. Art like the one created by Koons, Safer said, “can make you believe…there’s a sucker born every minute.”
This week, Koons was the subject of another 60 minutes segment on CBS. The piece, a profile, shares little with that of three decades ago, although looking at the two side by side reveals just how money came to dictate the taste of the art world in the time that has elapsed. Koons, more than any other artist of his generation, symbolizes this phenomenon.
While Safer looked away from Koons with healthy skepticism about the commerciality of his practice and personality, the new segment revels in the artist’s fame and wealth.
With host Anderson Cooper, who is, by his own admission, a collector of Koons’ works, we tour the artist’s factory-like studio and learn about his work at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. We hear about his “classic” habit of blowing past budgets, his “legendary” obsession with detail, and see vintage photos of the sculptor as a child. He almost always wears a dramatic costume.
Koons, with his Joker-like smile, is charming, if a bit innocuous.
“Maybe you think Jeff Koons looks like a self-help false prophet. A lot of critics do that,” Cooper says at one point. “But he sees art as something that can help people transform personally.”
We also visit Koons at his 800-acre farm in southern Pennsylvania, where he talks about tending to cows and horses during his days away from the studio. In this scene and others, the multi-millionaire artist is portrayed as something of a populist, a man who takes art low to reach audiences from all walks of life.
“It’s taking an object that New York elites might look at and think, ‘This is cheesy, this is trash, this is something you buy at a giveaway show,’ and it blows it up and makes it perfect and says, ‘That has value?’ Cooper asks critic and curator Robert Storr, brought in as a talking head.
“It has meaning, not necessarily value,” Storr responds. “The message is that he’s here to be adopted, not to be laughed at. You shouldn’t be so sure of your own tastes that you deny the possibility of other tastes.
The segment ends with a mention of Koons moon phases project for which he counts send 125 small stainless steel sculptures to the moon Later this year. The artworks are all for sale and each comes with an NFT as well as a separate Earth-bound sculpture.
“He won’t say how much [these pieces] will cost you,” says Cooper, “but with Jeff Koons, it’s a safe bet the price will be out of this world.
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