"As I stood and looked at it on a drizzly gray day," John Yau writes of looking at a radiant painting by Edward Zutrau, "I forgot that it was raining." That's what art can do - stop you in your tracks, make you forget absolutely everything save for that essential encounter between you and the work.
Jeff Koons is a hit-or-miss artist whose sculptures always give viewers something to talk about. The same isn't true of his paintings, none of which have ever become memorable because there is nothing particularly arresting about them. This doesn't mean that painting is dead, just that his are. A lot of the discourse around his sculptures gets unnecessarily heated, with (often White) critics arguing over whether or not they critique capitalism or celebrate consumerism,
Jeff Koons's "Banality" sculptures of the late 1980s are anything but ordinary: few can easily forget the sight of the Pink Panther embracing a partially naked woman, for one. But there's nothing quite so out of the ordinary about the artist's recent creations such as his 2016-21 sculpture Aphrodite, an eight-and-half-foot-tall nude that made its public debut at Gagosian gallery in New York last week.
