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拍品专文
Jeff Koons embraces the blatantly non-art forms of popular culture with almost emancipatory zeal. In discussing his work, the artist proclaimed:
I was telling the Bourgeois to embrace the things that it likes, the things it responds to. For example, when you were a young child and you went to your grandmother's place and she had this little knickknack, that's inside you, and that's part you. Embrace that, don't try to erase it ... Don't divorce yourself from your true being, embrace it. That's the only way that you can truly move on to become a new upper class and not move backwards (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., n.p.).
Koons's commitment to kitsch culture is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in his 1988 Banality series, of which Winter Bears is a prime example. Skillfully carved in wood and painted by European artisans in larger-than-life proportions, Koons demands that the sickeningly sentimental, bright-eyed bear couple be treated with artistic care equal to that of a piet'. Nonetheless, Koons would be the last to deny that Winter Bears was anything more than a giant tchotchke. Other works in the Banality series include the Pink Panther (lot ), Michael Jackson and Bubbles, the shaggy dog Bobtail and, together with Winter Bears, evoke the figurines and souvenirs found in every mall gift shop and tourist trap. As Robert Rosenblum has noted, by enlarging such knicknacks and putting them in a museum or gallery setting, Koons forces us "to look head on and up close at [their] mind-bobbling ugliness and deliriously vapid expressionsto look, really look, at the bizarre species of art that covers our planet and the pleased millions" (R. Rosenblum in J. Koons, 1992, pp. 15, 16)
Like his Pop art precedents, Koons recognizes the expressive potential in the awkward symbiosis of art and popular culture. Nonetheless, the pseudo-mechanical finishes and deadpan presentation of Andy Warhol's soup cans or Roy Lichtenstein's comic strips, for example, contrast strikingly with Koon's hand-crafted, hyper-sentimentalized subjects. Rather than celebrate or critique cool commercial culture, Koons taps into the fetishistic desires driven by the human need for unconditional love, here symbolized by a heart-shaped purse and expressed in the Winter Bears' over-enthusiastic greeting.
I was telling the Bourgeois to embrace the things that it likes, the things it responds to. For example, when you were a young child and you went to your grandmother's place and she had this little knickknack, that's inside you, and that's part you. Embrace that, don't try to erase it ... Don't divorce yourself from your true being, embrace it. That's the only way that you can truly move on to become a new upper class and not move backwards (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., n.p.).
Koons's commitment to kitsch culture is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in his 1988 Banality series, of which Winter Bears is a prime example. Skillfully carved in wood and painted by European artisans in larger-than-life proportions, Koons demands that the sickeningly sentimental, bright-eyed bear couple be treated with artistic care equal to that of a piet'. Nonetheless, Koons would be the last to deny that Winter Bears was anything more than a giant tchotchke. Other works in the Banality series include the Pink Panther (lot ), Michael Jackson and Bubbles, the shaggy dog Bobtail and, together with Winter Bears, evoke the figurines and souvenirs found in every mall gift shop and tourist trap. As Robert Rosenblum has noted, by enlarging such knicknacks and putting them in a museum or gallery setting, Koons forces us "to look head on and up close at [their] mind-bobbling ugliness and deliriously vapid expressionsto look, really look, at the bizarre species of art that covers our planet and the pleased millions" (R. Rosenblum in J. Koons, 1992, pp. 15, 16)
Like his Pop art precedents, Koons recognizes the expressive potential in the awkward symbiosis of art and popular culture. Nonetheless, the pseudo-mechanical finishes and deadpan presentation of Andy Warhol's soup cans or Roy Lichtenstein's comic strips, for example, contrast strikingly with Koon's hand-crafted, hyper-sentimentalized subjects. Rather than celebrate or critique cool commercial culture, Koons taps into the fetishistic desires driven by the human need for unconditional love, here symbolized by a heart-shaped purse and expressed in the Winter Bears' over-enthusiastic greeting.