{"id":15710,"date":"2014-08-18T20:27:51","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T20:27:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-today-i-begin-a\/"},"modified":"2018-12-05T18:45:55","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T01:45:55","slug":"blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-today-i-begin-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-today-i-begin-a\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-15710 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-today-i-begin-a\/attachment\/15711\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_nah42t7OHP1qdr6jto1_1280-100x100.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/blakegopnik.com\/post\/95121047061\">blakegopnik<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>THE DAILY PIC:\u00a0 <\/strong>Today, I begin a Koons-o-rama. Once a week for the next little while, the Daily Pic will visit and revisit the almost-perfect <a href=\"http:\/\/whitney.org\/Exhibitions\/JeffKoons\" title=\"Koons at the Whitney\">Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney<\/a> Museum of American Art in New York. I have huge respect for my fellow critics who feel that Koons is nothing more than a\u00a0 symptom of everything that\u2019s wrong with our art world, and maybe with our culture in general. On my first visit to the show, to shoot <a href=\"http:\/\/news.artnet.com\/art-world\/strictly-critical-video-gopnik-and-viveros-faune-at-the-whitneys-koons-retrospective-50154\" title=\"Gopnik and Viveros-Faune on Koons\">a video with my chum Christian Viveros-Faun\u00e9<\/a>, I almost let him convince me that Koons was precisely as bankrupt and shallow a figure as his fiercest critics say. Since then, I\u2019ve spent longer with the Koons show than with almost any display I can remember (with the very notable exception of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2010\/12\/23\/AR2010122301932.html\" title=\"Blake Gopnik on Las Meninas\">my week-long inspection of \u201cLas Meninas\u201d<\/a> at the Prado). On visit after visit, accompanied by any number of deep thinkers on art, I\u2019ve found that Koons has payed major intellectual and visual dividends.\u00a0 His art is simply too\u00a0<em>productive<\/em> to be dismissed. I feel as though his haters\u2019 larger, principled \u2013 and admirable<em> \u2013 <\/em>objection to certain Koonsian trends in art-world dynamics have blinded them to the details of what Koons has produced.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s Daily Pic, for instance, shows the Whitney digging deep into a little-known prehistory of Koonsiana. It turns out that as far back as 1979,\u00a0 Koons was acquiring and displaying product\u00a0 from some of the stranger corners of popular culture. With \u201cInflatable Flowers (Short Pink, Tall Purple)\u201d, he makes us want to know how it was that certain late-70s tchotchke producers felt it worth their while to make dumb inflatable flowers with such complex engineering. Koons so appreciates this redundant complexity that he displays his vinyl blossoms on mirrors, just as museums show Faberg\u00e9 eggs, so that we can take in their details from every side.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s another peculiarity of these works as shown at the Whitney: Koons cares so much about the details of his original vinyl flowers that he has had them laboriously refabricated for this retrospective, making sure that passing time and decaying matter would have no leverage on their appearance. That means that they pass out of the realm of normal Duchampian readymades \u2013 objects purchased and presented as art, mostly for the sake of the gesture itself \u2013 into a new realm of \u201cre-made readymades\u201d, where the objects themselves matter as much as the action of showing them. (At the risk of once again incurring the wrath of some of the more simpleminded Duchampians, let me say that I consider Marcel\u2019s artisanal remakes of his classic found objects something else altogether than Koons\u2019s; Duchamp\u2019s 1950s urinals are not a recapitulation of the original Dada works, but a piss-taking new riff on what \u201cFountain\u201d had come to mean.)<\/p>\n<p>On one visit to the Koons retrospective, the room with his vinyl flowers was full of tiny children whose art teacher had told them to draw Koons\u2019s inflatables. This struck me at the time as one of the more colossal misunderstandings that I\u2019d\u00a0 witnessed in a museum: Works of tremendous conceptual complexity were being used to teach kids the most conservative notions of what art should be. But then I was forced to rethink. One of the glories of Koons\u2019s works is that every one of them is a kind of Trojan horse, coming across at first as the simplest, dumbest aesthetic gift, and then turning out to ambush almost every conventional artistic model. I\u2019m afraid to say that some of my Koons-hating colleagues may be a bit like those Koons-sketching kids: They\u2019re stuck on first impressions of the art, and that keeps them from feeling obliged to look deeper. <em>(<\/em><em>Collection of Norman and Norah Stone; \u00a9Jeff Koons) <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>The Daily Pic also appears at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tumblr.com\/blog\/blakegopnik\/new\/ArtnetNews.com\"><span>ArtnetNews.com<\/span><\/a>. For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit <a href=\"http:\/\/blakegopnik.com\/archive\">blakegopnik.com\/archive<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>blakegopnik: THE DAILY PIC:\u00a0 Today, I begin a Koons-o-rama. Once a week for the next little while, the Daily Pic will visit and revisit the almost-perfect Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. I have huge respect for my fellow critics who feel that Koons is nothing more than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-45o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15712,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15710\/revisions\/15712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}