It is commendable that Jeff Koons employs so many people at, what I was told, good wages: I met him once and he seemed like a decent person without the arrogance his sculpture would suggest. But having encountered his work over his career I was initially perplexed, annoyed, and now indifferent, that such featureless artwork could be taken seriously; as Jed Perl* so eloquently expressed in his review the Whitney retrospective. There is nothing new here; Koons simply copied Andy Warhol’s strategy of using the techniques of mass production and recycled kitsch as a double-edged appeal to popularity, the difference is that I believe Warhol was half sincere and Koons appears utterly cynical. Koons’ enlarged reproductions are more contingent on Warhol’s methods and far removed from Marcel Duchamp’s; but there is, I believe a much deeper difference between Duchamp and Warhol (and his imitators) within a theoretical wing of art. Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol initiated two paradigm shifts that seem to mirror each other. Duchamp presented a repositioned urinal as an artwork he called “Fountain” in 1917. This was a logical extension of the concept of collage; the use of extraneous detritus that was first incorporated into paintings by either Braque or Picasso. With the Fountain there was an ontological re-categorization with detritus actually becoming the artwork. After Duchamp’s move any object could become accepted as an artwork simply with an artist’s designation. The epistemological shift was to the question: “Who is an artist and what gives him the right to say what is art?” Until Duchamp’s gambit artists gained legitimacy by making things, not choosing things. Choosing was the providence of the collector or curator, and bestowing legitimacy, the historian. Duchamp turned this on its head by choosing a mass produced object, and by magic, turned it into art, (although certainly not in a social vacuum). Warhol flipped this conception by mass-producing artworks and was innovative not from what he made (he was still making images on canvas) but by the sheer quantity and his ability to market his artworks. The use of mass-produced images from advertising and media was the inverse equivalent of Duchamp’s purchase of a urinal to use as an artwork. The material difference is that Duchamp limited his Readymades, whereas Warhol availed himself to an unlimited number of ready-made images to make thousands of artworks, like baseball cards for the rich. But on a much deeper level Duchamp brought the notion of collage to a head by introducing a different kind of object, one that changed the discourse by offering a physical substitute for the uniquely crafted object. We may ask if this changed the ontology of art as it certainly changed the epistemological terms; people began thinking about art in radically different ways namely that one could be an artist without any expertise of how to paint or sculpt. But did it change the fundamental materiality of art; that the intention, idea, and meaning can be detached from the physical object? Duchamp signed the Fountain as if it were an artwork but signed another name, “R. MUTT”, as if it were a forgery which entailed another level of duplicity, as if he was pretending not to be present yet remaining in plain sight, so that the signature was as false as the urinal was as real, as was the re-productive series it was plucked out from. This presented the artist and the object in very different roles; the urinal, as presented as an artwork, was merely a representation of Duchamp’s intention and, at the same time, it was his intention to deny the authorship by signing a different name than his own, thus signaling that this second intention was not to own up to the first intention to present the object as his artwork. And on it spins. It seems clear to me that this vertigo was intentional and was the “art”. If this was the case the work operated on the purely mental plane, which made it a new ontological species that the philosophical oriented artist must be aware of. Marcel Duchamp thought it best used quietly and in moderation.

*The Cult of Jeff Koons by Jed Perl
The New York Review of Books 9 25 2014