{"id":16248,"date":"2014-06-30T23:01:19","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T23:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-my-take-on-jeff\/"},"modified":"2018-12-05T18:58:48","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T01:58:48","slug":"blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-my-take-on-jeff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-my-take-on-jeff\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-16248 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/blakegopnik-the-daily-pic-my-take-on-jeff\/attachment\/16249\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" src=\"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/tumblr_n7zbazosK21qdr6jto1_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\/90380562269\">blakegopnik<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>THE DAILY PIC:<\/strong>\u00a0 My take on Jeff Koons? That he\u2019s the planet\u2019s sole sufferer from a disorder I\u2019ve dubbed \u201caesthetic agnosia\u201d: an inability to recognize the normal codes of art and culture. The prime symptom of Koons\u2019s illness is a career\u2019s worth of works that don\u2019t fit into any of the normal categories that the rest of us use to sort out the (art) world. He\u2019s the Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Sculpture \u2013 an outsider artist who happens to sit right in the center of the art-world inside. (That position alone is part of his genius.) This is what I felt when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2008\/06\/16\/AR2008061602842.html\" title=\"Gopnik on Jeff Koons in Chicago\">I reviewed his first retrospective<\/a>, only six years ago in Chicago, and my view hasn\u2019t much changed with his new spread at the Whitney \u2013 you can hear me voice it again in <a href=\"http:\/\/news.artnet.com\/art-world\/strictly-critical-gopnik-and-viveros-faune-at-the-whitneys-koons-retrospective-50154\" title=\"Gopnik and Viveros-Faune on Koons\">the latest \u201cStrictly Critical\u201d video<\/a> that I\u2019ve made with my (oh-so-misguided) pal <span class=\"st\">Christian Viveros-Faun\u00e9<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>But the Whitney show did make me think, again, of a recent(-ish) book called \u201cIn Praise of Copying,\u201d by the theorist Marcus Boon. It argues that the West has come to neglect (or even to deride) the ancient principle of <em><span>copia<\/span><\/em> \u2013 the pleasure to be had, and the insights to be gained, from the sheer multiplicity of things in the world around us. We moderns treasure unique originals \u00a0where we ought to value the endless copies we are, in fact, so good at making. Koons, of course, is our master of multiplictity. Works from the 1980s, such as \u201cNew Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue Doubledecker\u201d  that I\u2019m showing here, make that obvious \u2013 this is a shrine to <em><span>copia, <\/span><\/em>a reliquary of its patron saint Trademark. But much of Koons\u2019s art is about taking objects that ought to be unique \u2013 a balloon dog the size of an elephant, say \u2013 and finding ways to produce them in series. Even a moment of orgasm with his porn-star ex-wife, as much a <em>unicum<\/em> as anything ought to be, becomes a mechanically produced \u2013 and therefore reproducible \u2013 oil painting. (<em>Pace<\/em> almost all my art-critical colleagues, I happen to agree with Koons that his \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d porn pictures are among his greatest and most important works.) <\/p>\n<p>Koons misunderstands what a masterpiece ought to be \u2013 and therefore turns them out in numbers. <em>(Image \u00a9Jeff Koons)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><em><em>The Daily Pic also appears at <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/the-daily-pic\" title=\"The Daily Pic at ArtInfo.com\">blogs.artinfo.com\/the-daily-pic<\/a>. <\/em>For a full inventory of past Daily Pics visit <a href=\"http:\/\/blakegopnik.com\/archive\">blakegopnik.com\/archive.<\/a><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>blakegopnik: THE DAILY PIC:\u00a0 My take on Jeff Koons? That he\u2019s the planet\u2019s sole sufferer from a disorder I\u2019ve dubbed \u201caesthetic agnosia\u201d: an inability to recognize the normal codes of art and culture. The prime symptom of Koons\u2019s illness is a career\u2019s worth of works that don\u2019t fit into any of the normal categories that [&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-16248","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-4e4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16248","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=16248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16250,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16248\/revisions\/16250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}