Robin Dluzen

Ed Paschke, 2 tatuz 1969

• Eek. Seems like celebrity programming is taking up 50% of museum shows these days. Dennis Hopper’s getting another show, this time at the Royal Academy in London. [Artnet News]
• This week, AFC’s Chicago correspondent Robin Dluzen reported from the new Ed Paschke Center, for one of Chicago’s most revered artists. Newcity’s Jason Foumberg asks whether Paschke is still relevant; he seems to think yes, more than ever. [Newcity Art]
• Jeff Koons really does view his art as an enlightenment project. “I still have, I hope, at least three decades, maybe four decades to continue to make work and to try to exercise the freedom I have as an individual to really obtain as vast a parameter and a greatest closeness to enlightenment that you can have.” [BLOUIN Artinfo]
• Jeff Koons sees the flower dog as a work about loss of control and giving in to nature. He took two decades to make the Play-Doh pile. [BLOUIN Artinfo]
• New York’s ban on big sugary drinks has been quashed by the New York State of Appeals. That’s the end of that Bloomberg initiative. [The New York Times]
• Jeff Koons is a robot alien. When asked how involved he is in the production of his work he says, “The work is a total gesture to me.” When asked whether art has defined his life he says, “From the time I was a child, I developed a sense of self through art.” Nothing new in this interview, but for those who aren’t aware of the weirdness of Jeff Koons’s statements, this is the most recent example. [Time Out]
• The Atlantic Yards Project (the project containing the Barclay’s Center) was originally supposed to include thousands of affordable apartments. 11 years later, developer Forest City Ratner never delivered on those plans. It’s now being forced to get it done. If it doesn’t begin development next year, it pays a $5 million fine. [The New York Times]
• Dragons fucking cars: idiotic, but, at least, practically think-piece-proof. [Vocativ]
• AFC’s Corinna Kirsch tells her story of “surprise visits” from CEO Dov Charney while she was working at American Apparel. A thoroughly enjoyable read. [The Awl]
• Jerry Saltz spells out the difference between Koons then and now. Context and history are meaningful:

Watching Koons between 1985 and 1992 was like being on a roller coaster, beholding the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty, and the ugliness of our culture…Everything about him was played out in public: the hype, the high prices, the collector love, the critical cringing, his Twinkie-like quotes, like “It’s like I have God on my side or something,” and the almost-career-killing spectacle he put up in 1991, the show of enormous photographic paintings of himself with waxed chest and having anal sex with his porn-star ex-wife, Ilona Staller. In part owing to Koons, art in general regained the power to show us what Wallace Stevens called “the possible nest in the invisible tree.” Koons helped art reenter public discourse while also opening up the art world. A generation of artists and gallerists who had similar aspirations took the stage to excellent effect in the 1990s. That’s when their world began to mutate into what it is today.
Which is what? The very environment he did so much to reengineer, followed by the mad amplification of the luxury economy, has meant that Koons’s art now seems to celebrate the ugliest parts of culture. [Vulture]