Before going to see Koons at the Whitney this October, I had seen many images on social media of the exhibit, and heard about it from several friends and that it took up 5 full floors of the Whitney. I was attracted to the bright colors and the playfulness of Koons’s work that I had seen in pictures but while the exhibit looked beautiful, fun and exciting on social media, two of my closest friends of whom I have worked side by side with artistically in the past and whose opinion I take greatly into consideration, had told me their true opinion of Jeff Koons; that they both were extremely repelled by his work and it did not interest them at all, but in fact, it upset them. I was surprised by this, because I couldn’t imagine that sculptures of balloon animals could possibly make anyone upset, so I defended the artist in anyway I could, not fully realizing exactly what I was defending or why I was defending it.

When it was finally time for me to see the exhibit for myself, I was shocked. The exhibit in reality was nothing at all what I had expected or seen before in pictures, and from the moment I walked in I realized I didn’t have an accurate perception of the work and that there was definitely a lot I was about to learn about who Jeff Koons really was.

The first floor, what appeared to be a room full of Greek classical sculpture, was infact a part, specifically the first out of fourteen currently at the Whitney, of his series called Gazing Ball. Each of the sculptures, which were appropriating aspects of other cultures, had mounted on it a cobalt blue glass blown gazing ball, a series Koons attributes to combining pop culture and classical art and memorializing his hometown in Pennsylvania, where people used to always put gazing balls on their yard as somewhat of a visual generosity or gift.

The second floor starts out with The New, a series from the 80’s is a room of vacuum cleaners from the 80’s that were arranged on lights and lavishly on display, to Equilibrium, a room all about basketball which included unaltered Nike posters that Koons had procured himself, combined imagery he appropriated of portraits of some of the famous basketball players with added text or altered imagery. This room also included bronze covered floatation devices representing “salvation”, but in fact if anyone were to try and use them, they would drown.

Koons’s work is a long series of appropriated banal objects or imagery that he slightly alters in a satirical manner, poking fun at banal objects or advertisements. In Luxury and Degredation, he appropriates imagery from advertisements, particularly ones for alcohol, and changes the wording on them to poke fun or suggest ironic truths about society that people think about but maybe say for example, “Hennessy: The civilized way to lay down the law”.

More of his appropriation work is seen a bit in all of his series, because that is what I believe his work is generally to be about; taking imagery found in pop culture and making people give it a closer look, and essentially stating the obvious in bold in his work with no hidden meanings.

His series Made in Heaven is a series of images that portrays him and his wife at the time, famous porn star Cicciolina playing the role of contemporary Adam and Eve, surrounded by many objects symbolizing innocence, fidelity and affection such as butterflies, dogs, flowers, etc. The gigantic oil paintings can be hard to look at for some, because the overt sexuality surrounded by such contrasting imagery is taboo even now, let alone in the late 80’s when it came out. In the shots, Cicciolina is portrayed almost as an object of sex, because her eyes don’t often meet with ours, while Koons tends to stare us right in the eye while performing a crass sexual act on her. Although the paintings are beautiful aesthetically and achieve Koons’s goal in emancipating sensitivity and certain reservations about sex and masturbation, they may be seen as unpleasantly taboo and vulgar in the eyes of many.

Finally, the Jeff Koons exhibition ends with Celebration, a series representing the cycle of life and the milestones that occur every year. The series is most definitely supposed to evoke joy, and is the happiest most carefree floor of the exhibit I would say.

The series was designed to invoke feelings and reminders of love, birth, procreation and religion, and serve as broad public symbolism about Koon’s abducted son, who is always on his mind. The most playful room, which serves to make us feel happy, especially after all the other powerful imagery we just saw, is what appeared the most frequently on social media and thus skewed my view of the whole exhibit.

As many often do, I immediately wrote Koon’s art off as Kitsch and tasteless work that made me feel angry in a way. However speaking to more of my artistic friends whose opinions I highly value, I’ve begun to value his work more. Koons’s work is very powerful, and I definitely believe it changed my point of view on how one should approach making art. Koons may have shown explicit imagery, but he broke many barriers in his work by creating an almost entirely satirical exhibit that really makes us think about the things we are buying into as a society through media. He states the obvious in a way that we might have never alluded to ourselves, while still making aesthetically impressive works that allure and excite, or even upset and anger. Essentially, if I can’t respect his work for what it is, I can accept him as an artist who is capable of conjuring emotion from his audience.