Art Review:
Koons exhibit at Whitney Museum
Walking through the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Whitney Museum was like being exposed to a riot of color with every step. Some of Koons' works are more conventional, like his study of tulips, which portrays the colorful flowers as a series of curved tubes in a manner that is both abstract yet also representative of how the flower looks in life. Other of Koons' works, however, challenge the very notion of what constitutes art. For example, some of his sculptures look like brightly-colored vacuum cleaners. The cleaners are a mixture of bright shades and white and look strangely sanitized and inviting, even though they are reproductions of ordinary objects. According to the information provided at the exhibit, Koons was fascinated by the vacuum cleaner because of the way it symbolized conventional, static domesticity yet also had a kind of living, breathing component to it that made it seem 'alive' because of its activity. Interestingly, the design of the vacuum cleaners in some ways echo many modern, actual cleaners in their bright color scheme, although these shades would have been unusual when Koons first produced the sculpture. Regardless, this illustrates to an even greater degree the blending between art and life intentionally created by Koons.
Koons also enjoyed satirizing the conventions of high art. A number of his ceramic sculptures are deliberately designed to look like Greek heroes or gods. They have the appearance of relics,...
But the cool tone of the images in Warhol's works is one reason why a viewer might be tempted to read a kind of backhanded affection for advertising and consumption in Warhol's series, as well as satirical parody. What Hughes calls this affectlessness, a fascinated and yet indifferent take on the object, Warhol does not obviously express a point-of-view, rather he simply deploys sameness in different contexts -- advertising in
dialogue between theory and praxis has changed since the 60s. Dialogue between Theory and Praxis since the 1960s Jeff Koons is among the most controversial and intriguing artists to have emerged in the past decade. Like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol before him, he is concerned with the transformation of everyday objects into art and takes such post-modern issues as high and low culture, context, and commodification of art as the
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On the contrary, if I had been able to be a clergyman or an art dealer, then perhaps I should not have been fit for drawing and painting, and I should neither have resigned nor accepted my dismissal as such. I cannot stop drawing because I really have a draughtsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to
headline from May 2015. "Picasso's Women of Algiers Smashes Auction Record," is how the BBC phrased it, on May 12, noting that "Picasso's Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at auction, going for $160 million" (Gompertz 2015). In the frequently dicey and volatile early twenty-first century economy, it is clear that high art has managed to maintain its value in a way that the
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Extra Credit Scavenger Hunt The 2009 comedy film "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" is set in the famed Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., but in reality many of the scenes were shot inside New York City's American Museum of Natural History (AMNA), where the main character Larry Daley (played by Ben Stiller) actually worked in
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