I want to begin by saying that I read that the reason you got involved in art is because
it was one of the few things you could do better than your sister.
[ Laughter ] >>Maureen Orth: So is sibling rivalry what
sparked your whole career?
>>Jeff Koons: Well, my sister -- I have only one sibling, but my sister could always do
everything better.
She was three years older so she could jump higher and count further, speak better, but
finally when my parents saw me drawing one day, they kind of patted me on the back that
I finally had my own place in the family.
And I think that everybody become involved in areas in life for very simple reasons such
as that.
>>Maureen Orth: And speaking of family, you've just become a father for the eighth time in
August.
You have -- you have three grandchildren.
And I am interested because so many of your -- so many of your pieces are very playful
and toylike and childlike.
And I was wondering what do children teach you or why are so many of your pieces really
kind of very glossy and playlike?
>>Jeff Koons: Everything that I've been able to pick up from the activity of creating work
really leads me to the act of acceptance, and of first accepting the self and then once
you accept yourself you want to kind of expand your parameters and you go outward.
And children really don't make judgments.
I mean, they're open to everything.
They're open to the sky because it's blue, they're open to the color pink because it's
pink.
And I mean, they're just open to everything.
And so I'm attracted to those type of images to always communicate acceptance and openness.
>>Maureen Orth: And so many of the images that we are bombarded with today aren't really
images from art or drawings or sculptures.
You can look at the Zeitgeist logo, for example.
What influences you or how were you influenced by this accelerating technology of images
that we're seeing all the time?
>>Jeff Koons: I was admiring all day the Zeitgeist logo.
It's beautiful in its color.
But it's wonderful.
Through technology there's so many more connections that we can make to things.
And the power of art is connections, just consciousness itself.
But the more connections that you make the more three-dimensional something becomes and
the more it imitates life.
And art always wants to somehow get up on top of that.
It can create life, it can be an artificial life form.
You always think oh, this time you can do it, but of course it always fails.
But technology gives just more connections to actually make art much more powerful.
>>Maureen Orth: But you've put a Hoover vacuum cleaner inside a cube, you've suspended a
basketball in liquid, I guess, in some of your earlier work.
So are we going to pass to Android phones next or what will you celebrate from the current
technology?
>>Jeff Koons: Well, technology, it's important to use it as a tool.
And I think that young artists, or if people try to grab ahold of something, technology
that's new and think, "Oh, if I just show this, my work will be new."
But art really comes from a very profound place of just kind of following your interests
and focusing on those interests.
And it takes you to an archetypal type of vocabulary.
My work actually, as we look and we see a lot of external images, ready-made objects,
these are things that again communicate this act of acceptance and embracing the environment
around you that everything is here.
I actually have started to go and become much more involved with the work of Picasso and
have found that kind of the internal-type landscape that he was dealing with, finding
that very, very objective.
Because, again, it deals with acceptance.
>>Maureen Orth: So you're going more inwards, in other words?
>>Jeff Koons: Through this inward process, it automatically takes you outward again.
>>Maureen Orth: You know, you're famous for having an amazing factory for art in New York.
And you don't touch any of the work that you create yourself.
And you have -- instead, you have an Army of assistants, and some of them paint as small
as a little postcard, with numbered -- the paint has different numbers, and then they
apply it.
Can you talk about your process?
Because I know you're famous for being just fanatic and throwing stuff away after it's
been worked on for a couple years if you don't think the paint dried right.
But talk about your own process and why you don't touch your own work.
>>Jeff Koons: It's not that I can't.
>>Maureen Orth: We know that.
>>Jeff Koons: But when I say that, I mean today if I feel like I have to -- and, of
course, I'm touching everything.
And it's -- just as, you know, if an artist picks up a brush and, you know, you're telling
your fingertips, okay, I want to hold this brush and pull it this way, in working with
other people, you're just also -- you're informing them how -- what you're looking for, and you're
articulating and producing something that the mark that is they make are also articulations
through an extension from -- >>Maureen Orth: So what is a thing that you
know -- that you worked on the longest that, in the end, you just destroyed?
>>Jeff Koons: You know, there's been very few things.
Some paintings that maybe the -- the ground wasn't the best ground, or that it got damaged.
But when -- usually it takes a lot of time to make something and there's an economic
expense to it.
So I really think about things beforehand, and I preedit my work a lot.
But I stopped working with my hands.
One time, on a summer job, I kind of damaged my hand working in a machine shop.
And I was always fearful, maybe I'll get arthritis in that hand.
And I started to follow (saying name) kind of ideas.
So I think that took me this kind of path of just working with the ready-made.
But then, philosophically, I didn't want to alter anything.
I didn't want to have my own involvement in kind of making any changes to things.
>>Maureen Orth: Well, you didn't want to alter them philosophically, what do you mean by
that?
>>Jeff Koons: That they were perfect.
This sense of acceptance.
And, you know, if you look at acceptance, and first accepting yourself, and then having
the confidence to go outward, what it would lead you to is the acceptance of others.
And to just -- this kind of state of complete removal of anxiety, of just having total acceptance.
And I thought that's kind of the closest thing to kind of walking out of Plato's cave.
>>Maureen Orth: You know, it's interesting, because you exhibited, for example, some of
your hearts and some of your pieces in Versailles.
And that was considered scandalous when it was done.
So I think from listening to you, you're talking about acceptance, and you're talking about
universal imagery, et cetera.
So you're just trying to bring people together in spaces that you wouldn't ordinarily consider
them to be.
>>Jeff Koons: Maureen, what I've always really enjoyed about art is that it's about information
and making connections to things.
But it's about taking that information and bringing it through the senses.
So it's very much also about the way you feel.
And it's about enheightened situations and heightened feeling.
So that's, you know, a very important part of what art is and differentiates it from
other forms of kind of collection of information.
Because it also -- you know, you want it to affect biology.
You want it to affect who we are as humans and to be able to hopefully affect our genes
of what it means to be human and what possibilities there are for feeling of intensity, excitement.
>>Maureen Orth: We also have something called the art market, which goes up and down.
And I'd like to read you a quote that I came across the other day that I thought was quite
interesting from Klaus Biesenbach.
He said, "Art is not the art market.
Art history is not the history of the art market.
Art is about ideas and civilization.
And yet too often, it's marginalized by the market in America."
And I know that you were a commodities trader for fours years on Wall Street.
And I was wondering what that experience taught you about the art market.
>>Jeff Koons: That it's much more moral than --
[ Laughter ] >>Jeff Koons: -- the trading market.
But I did that only to support myself, that I would be able to have enough income to make
the art works that I wanted to make.
So I was a trader for about four years.
But people do focus on the art market.
I always just wanted to participate.
I grew up admiring different artists, Dali or Warhol.
I think, like in any area, when you want to participate, eventually somebody throws you
the ball.
I wanted to be involved.
So I think a market is possibly just some way of showing whether society finds any value
in what you're doing, what you're not doing.
But it's also very, very vast.
The art market is much vaster than it possibly could be as far as --
>>Maureen Orth: But you have, with your factory -- and how many assistants do you have working
for you?
>>Jeff Koons: 140.
>>Maureen Orth: 140.
So you have a lot to support, then.
So the market does become important to a certain extent, does it not?
>>Jeff Koons: The reality of trying to be able to sustain that as far as a continuing
kind of endeavor workforce, it would be.
But that's not the focus.
I mean, I always -- If I do what I would like to do and what I do well, hopefully, there's
somebody there that will appreciate that.
>>Maureen Orth: I'd like to talk to you about some of your specific images.
One of the ones you first became famous for was, you did a six-foot-long, I think, white
porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles the chimp.
Why did you make him white?
>>Jeff Koons: That was for my banality exhibition.
And in the banality exhibition, I was trying to communicate to people that whatever your
cultural history is, it's perfect.
I was trying to get people to accept their cultural history.
I wanted spiritual figures there that people would feel at ease to go along with that sense
of acceptance.
Michael Jackson's really there in the same kind of configuration as the Pieta.
It's that triangular kind of Renaissance sculpture taking place there.
And we're showing him as, like, a contemporary Christ figure.
>>Maureen Orth: Since I'm the person who did five investigative pieces on him in pedophilia,
that startles me a little bit.
>>Jeff Koons: At the time I did this, this was '88.
So the type of adulation that people give him, he was an amazing performer.
The way he used his voice, it was very much about being alive and in the moment and the
sensation.
When I made that work, that's what it was about, this type of adulation and playing
him like a Christ-like figure, like a celebrity.
This work also had to absorb his downfall.
But art works are also free of that, just like Andy's Marilyn's free of that, or his
Elvis is free of that.
>>Maureen Orth: I'd like to also talk to you about -- one of your most famous pieces is
your puppy, the beautiful one in front of the Bilbao.
Is it still in front of the Bilbao Museum?
That particular piece weighs 44 tons, isn't it?
Doesn't it?
>>Jeff Koons: It weighs a lot.
And I think I did hear that figure at one time.
>>Maureen Orth: And 70,000 flowering plants, and 25 tons of soil.
I mean, you're thinking big; right?
>>Jeff Koons: Yes.
I spent a lot of time, Maureen, in Europe.
And I went to a lot of Baroque and Rococco churches.
I wanted to have an artwork that would reveal the dialogue that takes place in the Baroque
and Rococo.
I think the piece is very much about control that it takes to make a work like that, but
also giving up control, that once it's planted and every decision's made where this plant
goes against that plant, you walk away, and it's just in the hands of nature.
And, you know, some plants are going to shoot out 100 centimeters in this direction; another
will only go out 60 centimeters, but it will want to dominate across --
>>Maureen Orth: So you can just walk away from it and let nature take its course?
>>Jeff Koons: That's right.
>>Maureen Orth: Now, it reminds me also of a bumper sticker I saw in Berkeley on this
broken-down car that said insatiability is not sustainability.
When you get something on that scale, did you ever think in those terms at all?
Or do you just let your imagination go wild?
>>Jeff Koons: One of the beautiful things about art is that, you know, it deals with
the impractical.
And so, you know, if something presents itself and it has enough reason to come into being,
you try to do that.
But there are some things that, you know, you can think about that do not come into
being.
>>Maureen Orth: Now, tell us a little bit about the really big project that you aspire
to do, which is to suspend a 1943 locomotive from a 160-foot crane on the High Line of
New York.
And how's that coming?
[ Laughter ] >>Jeff Koons: Yeah.
You know, it's running into some opposition.
[ Laughter ] >>Jeff Koons: It's running into opposition
in that, you know, I had the idea maybe about a decade ago.
And I've, you know, created the models.
And we went into engineering phases.
And, originally, we thought we could build it for 25 million.
And then when people became interested, we'd get a little deeper into the engineering,
because that also costs a lot, we found out it would cost a little more.
And more recently, it was as high as up to 50 million.
And so that's putting it on hold a little bit at the present moment.
But what I really want to do is strip it down.
And I would really like to have this piece come into the world.
And the only way to do that is to try to be able to have it accomplish everything that
I want.
But I have to bring it in to be less expensive.
But can I say what it would do, the train?
>>Maureen Orth: Sure.
>>Jeff Koons: The train would function, really, maybe the way a square does in Europe or different
architectural piece would do, as a rallying point for people.
And it would perform three times a day.
You know, it could perform once a day or -- but three times a day, I envisioned it.
And when it would perform, it would do everything that a real train would do.
And a real train, it takes eight hours to build up enough steam and power to pull out
of a train station.
This would condense that time to 30 minutes.
So if you're sitting underneath it, you would maybe start to see a little steam leaking
or lights flickering from the heat of the firebox.
But, eventually, it will start to move.
And just as we breathe, that's the only thing that a train does.
The only noise that a train really makes, if you take it off its tracks, is it's breathing.
(Breathing).
And it would start just from that first turn, firing of the pistons, until it's going full
speed.
And in this case, it would be 80 miles an hour.
It would hit this plateau.
Woo-woo!
And then it would take on the same kind of bell curve going up to that plateau.
It will slow down at the same speed until that last (breath).
And each time it puffs, it's like in the time square, they have the guy who used to below
kind of the smoke rings.
It's a perfect little puff of steam that comes out.
And it was just that people get a sense of power, but at the same time, it keeps you
in contact with mortality.
And, you know, that isn't the most technological thing today.
But it still connects you with this type of power.
So it does give you some sense of mortality, sense of family unity, community.
>>Maureen Orth: And you -- if this comes into being, you will have created a great landmark
for the city of New York forever.
>>Jeff Koons: Or wherever it would go.
>>Maureen Orth: Wherever it will go.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We very much enjoyed it.
Thank you, Jeff Koons.