Jeff Koons. Conversations with Norman Rosenthal. London, Thames and Hudson, 2014

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION


Jeff Koons
Conversations with Norman Rosenthal

(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)

London, Thames and Hudson, 2014, pp. 295
ISBN: 978–0–500–09382-5

[Original version: December 2014 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) The cover of the book 

An Interview Book as a Source of Art History

On the occasion of the retrospective of Jeff Koons at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in June 2014 (exhibition then continued at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until April 2015), the conversations between Jeff Koons and Sir Normal Rosenthal have been just issued by the London publishing company Thames and Hudson. Also a French edition has been produced by the Parisian Flammarion. The retrospective, still ongoing in Paris, will move to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where it will open in June 2015.

Hence, an interview book, between an artist on the one hand and a critic and curator on the other one. By now, a classic form of source of contemporary art history [1]. Enriched by a remarkable iconographic apparatus, the book is however published in a particularly small font size. So, who has reached the age of presbyopia must equip himself with powerful glasses. For the rest, it is a nice text and - in my opinion - also a convincing one: it gives the floor to Koons and Rosenthal in a well-structured way, enabling – through their conversations – to place the American artist, born in 1955, in the framework of art history, contemporary and not; it marks in particular the path of his artistic maturation, starting from a strict US popular inspiration and actually revealing a universal, highly educated, artist with unsuspected European ties. This volume may be perhaps able to strengthen the view of Koons not simply as a kitsch American artist (expression that is often used, sometimes in positive terms, but more often with derogatory intentions). This would allow a more complete understanding of the artist.

Who wants to watch a pleasant conversation between Koons and Rosenthal (during Art Basel 2012) can find the full version of the video on Youtube [2]. Sir Norman has been for many years the Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He was responsible for three decades of performances in London, which marked what is called the "rebirth of painting" in the last decades of the last century, with special reference to movements like the 'School of London' (think of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney), the Neue Wilden in Germany and the Transavanguardia in Italy. Rosenthal has also devoted particularly close attention to contemporary German artists (Beuys, Baselitz, Kiefer and Schnabel) and has helped make them famous beyond the borders of Germany (his interest in the German world is a direct expression of his cultural heritage: he comes from a German-Slovak Jewish family who managed to migrate to Britain when Nazism took over). Rosenthal is therefore not a lover of contemporary art as a light and ephemeral phenomenon. However, he remains a great admirer of Koons, who is perhaps the opposite of those complex, and somewhat aggressive artists, mentioned above.

Moreover, presenting an interview in paper form (with the ambition to cover all periods and activities of Koons), this work contributes to confirm the centrality of the book as a permanent form of transmission of culture compared to others (and more fashionable) media tools. It is obvious that Koons possesses its pages on the web (http://www.jeffkoons.com/) and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/jeffkoonsstudio), official sources that allow you to follow all his statements, articles, television interviews and other events with or on him. Most images in this post are in fact drawn from these official sources. There are also numerous unofficial pages on Koons on Facebook [3], the most important of which has more than 50 thousand fans. The search for videos on "Jeff Koons" on Google returns 84,200 results (with the same search for web pages you will get 1 million 840 thousand results).

Yet it is with this new interview book that Koons chooses to provide an overview about thirty years of his artistic career. Moreover, Koons - unlike many other contemporary artists who have produced works in a book format, the so-called 'artists' books', but essentially as works of art without any written comment – does not display any problems with writings. Indeed, he strongly insists on the role of narrative in art, and identifies the centrality of the "vocabulary of personal iconography" as part of the style of the artist. These are all concepts deeply related to writing.

The work is structured into eight chapters/conversations: the first on the concept of art, the second on the formation of the artist, the chapters third, fourth and fifth on the different series of works from the seventies to the present day, the sixth on the artist’s gesture, the seventh on the art world and the eighth on the aesthetic vocabulary of Koons. The style is deliberately that of the spoken language, also to emphasize that these are real conversations, not reconstructed dialogues. The reading is very smooth, although the concepts and terms are often repeated in the course of the conversation, and often during the same page (it is true, however, that in English the repetition of terms and concepts has not the equivalent irritating effect attributed to it in Italian; repeating means helping to understand). Sir Norman Rosenthal shows an elevated language, although sometimes allows himself some lexical freedom. Jeff Koons is more direct - as you would expect from an American - even if his intent is always to ‘fly high’. The dialogue has a fast pace: normally, in the space of one page, the two leave each other the floor two or three times, and their statements do not take up an entire page ever anyway. The apparatus of the illustrations helps the reader to better understand the exchange between the interlocutors.

The result is an indeed absolutely friendly interaction. To use the language of sport, Sir Norman, the great admirer, offers some real good assists to his painter friend, allowing Jeff Koons to clarify at best his thought. Differences of opinion are rare. Rosenthal constantly uses adjectives of great appreciation on the art of Koons; the artist seems at times almost intimidated by such praise.

I confess having purchased the volume because I was primarily driven by curiosity, not without some prejudice, after reading the negative reviews of the French press in coincidence of the opening of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Criticism which was counterbalanced by a great public success. Is Jeff Koons, therefore, simply a great charmer? A man with the ability to sell his works (in fact in his youth he was a stockbroker), managing to fool the public?

The negative arguments are well known. They refer to the role of the culture of mass consumption, the sense of ephemeral work, the representation of aesthetic forms considered elsewhere devoid of any artistic value, and finally the commercial and almost speculative intent: to produce art using extraordinarily expensive materials, almost industrially, in order to sell it to an audience of billionaires willing to pay any price. The prices of the works of Koons have indeed reached stratospheric levels: the "Dog balloon - Orange" (fig. 4) was sold by the auction house Christie's for over 58.4 million dollars in November 2013, about 48 million euro at the current exchange rate. It is the highest price on record ever for the work of a living artist.

After reading the book, however, I wonder if all these criticisms, in reality, are not the reflection of a somewhat parochial prejudice.

Three key words: decoration, monumentality, archetype

If I were to try to identify three key words used in the book to define the art of Koons, I would say: decorative art, monumental art, and archetype. It is my personal reading, not necessarily that of the two protagonists of the interview.

Decorative art for the sake of the particular and the surprising, for the love of precision in the use of line and form, and for the recurring use of the same themes (including the same objects) to make the key of the art works more recognizable. Koons is logically connected to much earlier stages of the history of art, all linked to a visual and symbolic figurative world, and characterized by the prominence of the line and the importance of the narration: the world of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, but also the Baroque and Rococo (of which Koons talks a lot in the book), the Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil (to which Koons never refers in reality, but to which in my view he seems to have manifest links), and the pop-art and comics (an obvious reference). Precisely because of the nature of his decorative work, I would have rather a lot of problems to tie him to many other phases of contemporary art: expressionism, abstract art, abstract expressionism and many other avant-garde movements (with the exception of dada and pop art).

Monumental art, because of the desire to create art with a great effect, and - as he calls it – “the grandest gesture”. Koons even repeatedly expresses regret that he was – in terms of art gesture - still below his potential. "I would like to have a certain consciousness, a certain freedom of gesture before I die. I would really like to make the great gesture that I feel inside I have the potential to do. What holds me or others back from that is a form of anxiety. I just feel that everything can be revealed if people can have a sense of acceptance. I’m constantly trying to participate in this acceptance as I feel that the simplicity of everything can be revealed. Then there would be nothing to hold me back from the grandest possible gesture that I could make"(p. 34).

Perhaps the gesture that Koons has in mind is a work like the Eiffel Tower, a monument that marked an era symbolically. Obviously, the monumental iconography of Koons is different from that of Gustave Eiffel. Koons tells, in the book, of a project of which there is only a model: a yellow-red crane of 49 meters, from which a steam locomotive (upside down) is hung and under which the public can walk. It is a project designed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), but - says Koons - might end up somewhere else.

One work of clear monumental nature by Koons is realized by the combination of two swings for children (representing a pony and a dinosaur), combined in a stainless steel structure built – according to engineering methods - in such a way that on it can live, through an internal system of irrigation, 50 thousand flowers. The work was among others exposed in Avignon, Versailles, Basel, and most recently in New York, in front of the Rockefeller Centre.

Archetype, for the idea of creating a Platonic and Jungian artistic world, where each work displays (in an abstract and generalized way) arcane, fundamental and innate concepts: balance, grace, acceptance, sexuality, transcendence, luxury. Art - explains Koons - is the “realm of the archetypal, where the vocabulary is profound and communal. (...) In terms of art, it’s people in history who have used different vocabularies of art. Those vocabularies let you go back in time and connect to information that is essential to life, and that has helped keep people alive. That’s how I define an archetype – information that helps sustain life" (pp. 13-14). Rosenthal recalls the examples of Dalí, De Chirico and Magritte; Koons explains that he knew the surrealists through the school of the Chicago Imagists, and his teacher Ed Paschke, but had really coped with European art only after moving to New York. In fact, he says, his reference is an arcane art; and for this reasons actually a very old art, rather out of any time. An art that can benefit from industrial objects used in symbolic form: Koons therefore adopts the dada technique of the ready-made, inspired by Marcel Duchamp. An art that (especially in painting, based on non-prospective overlapping of different levels) understands how to document the contemporaneity and co-presence of archetypes. But it is also an art that can seek direct dialogue with that of classical antiquity (as in the series of “Gazing balls”, crystal balls dear to popular tradition of Pennsylvania, which are superimposed to plaster copies of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures).

Art as removal of anxiety

Jef Koons says: "It took me a really long time to realise that art is actually a process of removing anxiety. Art continues to reveal what it can be, and that changes daily, but for me art is always involved with this removal of anxiety. I think that removing anxiety reveals just how simple the world and the reality of our experience can be. It’s about knowing ourselves, as a sense of self-acceptance is so important. The motivation of art is the removal of any kind of guilt or shame, or anything that people have within their history that alienates them from just dealing with themselves"(p. 10). Art has thus a therapeutic function; but the opportunity to learn about themselves - says Sir Norman - is not only a product of art, but of any other business: mathematics, physics, medicine, politics. Therefore, Rosenthal asks: are art and other activities the same thing, or are fundamentally different? Rosenthal expects that Koons would attributes higher powers to art, but the answer surprises him: "It’s the same. - replies Koons – It’s absolutely the same. But art makes its therapeutic potential very clear to me because it connects many different disciplines together and it lets you become involved in a dialogue with theology and, at the same time, sociology. It gracefully lets you focus on many particular areas and, in that way, it is a wonderful gift that you give to yourself. Art is about having interest in life, developing a sense of self-respect, respect for others and respect for life energy."(p. 13).

Art as acceptance

Koons’ eclectic attitude has its ultimate source in (i) the idea of the need to establish a rule of general acceptance (acceptance of everything - Rosenthal says Koons has actually applied Buddhism to art), (II) the overcoming of any critical judgment on what is beautiful and (III) the need to seek perfection in everything. The art therefore has a liberating effect, because it allows people to overcome their anxieties and to accept any part of their past; however, not in the Aristotelian cathartic sense (i.e. facing the public with the monstrosities of the world), but in the Platonic sense, displaying to the public an extraordinary variety of positive archetypes. And the artist, making a conscious use of the banal, aims precisely to avoid imposing his own world to society; rather, he wants to utilize the objects that his audience just makes use of on a daily basis outside of the sphere of art, and therefore does not want to exercise any violence on them. Koons does not accept the definition of kitsch (in this respect, he is very different from Warhol), but assigns to the term banal a meaning which is not negative at all.

The central theme of the series "Banality" is in fact that of the removal of judgment. The series is centred on the figure of the pig, combined in different works such as St John the Baptist (a porcelain with a religious subject and a clear derivation from Italian Renaissance) and Stacked (a sculpture in polychrome wood, recalling the tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, but with a pork instead of the donkey, at the base of the pyramid of the animals). Sir Norman asks Jeff Koons whether these images should be specifically assigned an equality of imagery.

“Jeff Koons – I have to say, Norman, you have said that very well about equality. In ‘Banality” this aspect of removing judgement is very, very clear. I know at that time I was looking at ads, I was looking at postcards, I was looking at the things around us in the world and what people respond to. They will respond to an ad of somebody balancing a watermelon on their head and wearing big sunglasses, maybe playing a jazz trombone at the same time. But although they will respond to that, somewhere there’s a sense of guilt about it. People use art to disempower people. They use it as a mechanism to empower themselves – they are the holders of the rule, they are the holder of the significance of culture, and art is something that you have to come pre-prepared for. I wanted to make a body of work that was all about empowerment and to let people know that everything in their past, in their cultural past, is perfect. 

Norman Rosenthal – What do you mean exactly by the world ‘banality’? It’s a really important thing for me to try and understand. Saying something is banal is quite pejorative. It’s almost the worst thing you can say to an artist – it’s almost the worst word you can use – and here you are making art which you are calling ‘Banality', in which you include things like the tower of pigs, Michael Jackson and, of all people, St John the Baptist. Why do you think the banal is capable of being elevated into art? How do you arrive at that kind of intuition? It’s clearly an aspect of your art that is incredibly important.

Jeff Koons – On the chalkboard in one of my ads for the ‘Banality’ exhibition, I wrote ‘Banality as saviour’. 

Norman Rosenthal – Banality as saviour? 

Jeff Koons – As an art format. I was using banality to communicate that the things we have in our history are perfect. No matter what they are they’re perfect. They can’t be anything else but perfect. It’s our past and it’s our being, the things that we respond to, and they’re perfect. And I used it to remove judgement and to remove the type of hierarchy that exists. I don’t like to use the word ‘kitsch’, because kitsch is automatically making a judgement about something. I always saw banality as a little freer than that.” (pages 136-140)

Art as a link between individuals, between things, between periods of art

Art also has the power to bind past and future. "(…) when you do this activity of getting lost – of being open to human energy, to human potential to connect - you realize that time starts to bend. In one moment you are connected to the past and the future, although you are very much in the present moment. All of a sudden you can walk down the street and absolutely everybody will look familiar to you – every face is so familiar and there is a sense of going forward, advancing yourself in time. The mildest example of this is just making connections between things. You can see how everything really does reveal itself through these combinations "(p. 14). "Dealing with art history is how you time travel, as it focuses your interests and makes connections. Instead of having this linear view of time, all of a sudden it bends and you can shift it closer to the present moment" (p. 27).

American culture and European culture

We have already said that, since his move from Chicago to New York, Koons has devoted great energy to the dialogue between American culture and European culture. Several times, during the interview, Sir Norman tries to describe it as a purely American artist, while Koons answers to feel as a much more universal artist. Hereafter is an example of how he combined themes of American culture with those of European culture.

Koons produced a bust of Louis XIV (fig. 15), in tandem with the portrait of the famous American actor and presenter Bob Hope (fig. 16), because the two represented in his opinion the two opposite extremes of art manipulation. Incidentally, the bust of Louis XIV of Koons was exhibited in the same building as the one of the same monarch produced by Bernini, on the occasion of an exhibition of Koons at the Château de Versailles, in 2008. The heir of the Bourbon house had unsuccessfully tried to ban - through the judiciary - the exposure of Koons’ bust of the monarch. Let us listen, however, what Koons tells us on the contrast between Louis XIV and Bob Hope.

“Jeff Koons – (…) It was part of a “Statuary” show, in which I wanted to have a panoramic view of society. I had Louis XIV at one end of this panoramic view and Bob Hope at the other end.

Norman Rosenthal – Did you feel that Bob Hope and Louis XIV were of ‘equal value’ as symbols – cultural symbols? 

Jeff Koons – They were ready-mades (…) I remember walking down Canal Street and seeing a fibreglass bust of Louis XIV in this place called Canal Plastics, where I would get a lot of my plastic sheets. I thought it was fantastic. I carried that with me in my head and then when I was walking around somewhere, probably somewhere around Times Square, I saw a little plaster cast of Bob Hope. Then this narrative started to develop. I realised they were really symbols of what happens when you put art in the hands of either the mass, with Bob Hope, or an individual, in Louis’ case of a monarch. If you put in the hands of the mass - Bob Hope – he would tell a joke. He would chose the joke not because he subjectively really liked it, because he told it the night before and it got the largest response. It would be reflective of the mass ego. But if you put art in the hands of a monarch like Louis it would eventually only be reflective of his own ego. (pages 125-128).

The link with European art

It is sufficient to just check the analytical index of the book to find out that Bernini has the same number of citations as Andy Warhol, and that European sources do not only include Dalí, Duchamp and Picasso (as you would possibly suspect), but also Courbet, Manet, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rubens and Titian. Obviously, of these artists Koons gives a very personal, sometimes surprising reading. So we discover - in many passages - that many European artists were direct sources of inspiration for the American artist. Hereafter are some examples.

“Jeff Koons - (…) when I made 'Michael Jackson and Bubbles' [note of the editor: the name of the chimpanzee of Michael Jackson] I was thinking of Renaissance sculpture instead of antiquity. ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ has a triangular-shape structure that is the same as Michelangelo’s Pietà. It does also make reference to Egyptian sculpture – it’s a little bit like King Tut, and the way the leg comes up makes a pyramid, and the body makes another pyramid. So you have the three Pyramids of Giza there. But it is more of a reference to Renaissance sculpture.

Norman Rosenthal – Another work of Renaissance art, Masaccio’s fresco The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, was a catalyst for your next series, the ‘Made in Heaven’ pieces. This was a wonderful and extraordinary yet difficult period in your life.

Jeff Koons – With “Banality” I had started communicating for the first time that people should embrace who they are; embrace their own history, their own cultural history. ‘Made in Heaven’ was about one of the things that distances people from embracing who they are, embracing their own being: their sexuality. So I wanted to use sexuality as a metaphor, as a kind of continuation of ‘Banality’, but to go a little more direct psychologically into what keeps people from embracing who they are. After I saw the Masaccio painting 'The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden' I wanted to make a body of work about sexuality that would help remove that guilt and shame. My ex-wife, Ilona, always embraced her body without any guilt or shame, so she had that really tremendous energy. 

Norman Rosenthal – Energy? 

Jeff Koons – Yes, energy and the grace of just revealing herself without any sense of guilt or shame. That body of work is actually one of the first bodies of work where I start to make more direct interaction with other artists, with Masaccio, with Manet. One painting is called Manet.” (pages 145-148).[4].

And yet, Koons and Rosenthal devote another page to Bernini, when they talk about ancient sculpture. The two identified Praxiteles as a model, and now are discussing of sculpture and perfection. Here is the conversation that follows:

“Norman Rosenthal – You talk about Praxiteles, and perhaps we can talk about the sculptors of the past that interest you. For example, do you love Canova or not? 

Jeff Koons – (…) Not so much. Not so much.

Norman Rosenthal – Why don’t you like Canova? Because at one level one could say that I could imagine you giving me the opposite answer. Canova is certainly an artist who tried to achieve this kind of Neoclassical perfection. 

Jeff Koons – I feel that perfection, and I think that my work is a lot simpler. I don’t want my work ever to feel that confined, that its performance is confined. For me the performance happens outside the object. It’s a freer performance. If I look at Canova, I feel that everything is so controlled and that it has to be just a certain way. If I look at Bernini, it’s so powerful, it’s so rich, so involved …

Norman Rosenthal – So sexy too.

Jeff Koons – And so perfect. But you look at the chest of the dog in 'The Rape of Proserpina': it’s so lightly honed as far as the chisel marks go. Even though the dog’s hair flows in a pattern in one direction, the dog’s hair is going in different directions in a way that wouldn’t actually happen on a dog, but still it just works. It’s perfect, and that sense of freedom is also necessary. Normally, I know you always enjoy Puppy.

Norman Rosenthal – That kind of sculpture -‘Puppy’, for example – has a different manner to the quasi-perfections of the ‘Celebration’ sculptures. [Note of the editor: for instance the Balloon Dog (Orange) shown above - fig. 4)]

Jeff Koons – The element that I think is so successful in ‘Puppy’ is this dialogue between control and giving up control, and that’s what you feel in Bernini – absolutely controlled elements meeting other aspects that are completely uncontrolled. The passions are uncontrolled, and the action, the movement, what’s going to happen next is more open.

Norman Rosenthal – And in Bernini’s 'Saint Teresa', for example.

Jeff Koons – Yes, if you look at the ability to control the material and at the same time the joy you could feel of him giving up controlling it, like on the chest of the dog.” (page 189)

The role of the workshop / studio of the artist

The interview book opens with a reference to the workshop of Rubens. It is an interesting aspect that I would not like to forget.

It is Sir Norman speaking: "When I look at these kids working away so intensively in your studio, it is what I imagine the studio of Rubens would have been like, with Rubens walking around directing, making drawings and planning compositions, while around him there would have been a lot of assistants engaged in all kinds of activities in relation to realising his paintings." (p. 10)

Why a reference to Rubens? Rosenthal explains that Rubens did not perform any of his works manually: he only gave instructions to a hundred boys, and supervised closely the execution by them of his own projects.

Similarly, Koons is also the planner and constant supervisor of his works, in a studio with 100 and more associates in New York. The jobs are very difficult, the materials are really complex, at times the duration of the execution requires years. What seems - it was already said – to be trivial, it may take many years of work. Koons’ studio produces about ten paintings and ten statues every year. For the statues, the use of computers (especially to reproduce existing objects) and 3D printers (to make the models) is very important.

Rosenthal asks Koons if he still feels to be an artist, despite he does not operate any longer directly with his hands. Here is his answer: "I am responsible for each and every mark in every painting; in every sculpture I take care of every detail. And if I am working with something that pre-exists, it gives me a format and then it just has to be like that. That’s the framework, that’s the guideline that people who are working with me have to follow, have to work within, so that I can really be responsible for each mark. I have to have direct honesty. "(page 230)

Conclusions

Reading the 295 pages, it becomes clear that at the centre of the work of Koons is not a commercial intent, but the ambition (and perhaps the illusion) of being able to use art to liberate people from their anxiety, their sense of guilt and shame. Koons decided to pursue this objective by creating a kind of art that, in the course of thirty years, combines some specific features: decorative and monumental aspects, references to fundamental issues of the human condition - real archetypes - and quotes from American and European art. The combination of these elements is not intended, however, to make works more complex, but rather to convey the message that an element of beauty (indeed, of perfection) exists in every work of art as well as in the personal history of each of us. Thus, Koons aims to remove any aspect of violence from art, as an activity that would impose an external system of values to the public, and seeks to establish the principle that in an artistic activity everything is permitted, provided that it ensures, and does not take away, power to the people who react to that art. It is an art that is in danger of being considered banal (basically a risk to which were already exposed several generations of artists), but to this blame Koons responds by raising the banality to art. It is perhaps for this reason that the work of Koons continues to be favoured by the majority of the public and to be met by the scepticism of critics.

In an attempt to reach a synthesis, Koons then decides to accept everything (actually, with a clear repulsion for any form of reproduction of violence) and to suspend any critical judgment. He puts himself in the hands of the public, trying to educate it to an equal attitude of acceptance, of itself and of its history (even before of the art work itself).

I wonder if this is not the same perspective in which the old Roman world reacted, when (facing the cultures of the peoples they had subjugated) it replied expanding its polytheism to new cults (with a few exceptions, such as the Jewish and Christian) and then setting a system of equivalence between gods, cultures, and art forms. For each Latin deity corresponded a Greek god, and often Egyptian, Oriental, Celtic ones, etc. The goal was to create a global culture for the largest part of the then known humanity. To many Greeks, this Roman stance must have seemed a terrible trivialization, but if it was, it was in fully awareness: a necessary simplification, if you want to extend the sharing of the same system of values to a such varied empire.

We experience today a new form of globalization, and that of Koons is perhaps another and different attempts to find a universal language. On Koons, one may have very different ideas, but one cannot ignore him anymore.

It is the merit of this interview book, and of the conversations which Jeff Koons had with Norman Rosenthal, one of the major critics and curators of contemporary art in Europe, to have given the floor to the artist, so that he could present his interpretation of the world, and allow each reader to draw his own conclusions.

NOTES

[1] Think of the Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabannes, published in 1971, and of the Interviews with Francis Bacon, which David Sylvester published in 1975. Both volumes have been regularly republished since then. As to the Italian world, think for example of the Conversation Pieces by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1993, and the more recent Opere d'arte a parole: dialoghi sull'arte contemporanea (Works of art in words: dialogues on contemporary art) by Angelo Capasso. Video series of conversations between artists and critics are available at the websites of major contemporary art institutions, such as Art Basel (https://www.artbasel.com/en/Basel/About-the-Show/Talks/Conversations), Palazzo Grassi (http://www.palazzograssi.it/it/archivio-incontri-artisti) and the Guggenheim Foundation
(http://www.guggenheim.org/search?cx=001816328621941992898%3Aupy5cqylet8&ie=UTF-8&q=Conversations+with+Contemporary+Artists). That the format of the conversation between the artist and the critic / curator has remained one of the main sources of contemporary art history is also documented by the "Conversation Series" by Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine Galleries in London, which has issued 28 conversations with leading living artists in the last decades (in the framework of the ''Interview Project "), published by Walther König publishers in Cologne. The conversation number 22 - dated 2010 - is with Jeff Koons. See:
http://www.artbook.com/9783865606358.html.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEXYio6H3Dc

[3] https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeff-Koons/13590051972 ; 

https://www.facebook.com/JeffKoons; https://www.facebook.com/jeffkoons4

[4] It is Manet's Olympia to have hit Koons’s interest, since the days of the academy, as he tells Sir Norman on page 27. In the history of art lectures, the professor spoke of the symbolic aspects of the work, and explained that the black cat was the symbol of prostitution. The painting "Manet" by Koons is available on the internet, but not on his official website, and it is not reproduced in the book. See however: 

http://faculty.etsu.edu/koterbay/images/ARTH4077ContemporaryArt/koons.manet.91.jpg