Jeff Koons
1955–
Since the early 1980s, Jeff Koons has tested the boundaries between contemporary art and key aspects of American society, including marketing and the media, religion and popular entertainment, and technological innovation. Koons emerged among the first generation of artists reared on television and pop culture, influences that led them to pointedly mine and analyze the gloss and fervent consumer culture associated with the Ronald Reagan era. His breakthrough series The New serves as a meditation on the obsession with novelty that underpins both the avant-garde and the market economy, each of which depends on fresh offerings to whet appetites and drive sales.
In sculptures such as New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue Doubledecker, Koons presents the then latest-model vacuum cleaners as pristine, even virginal, symbols of newness. He chose the appliance in part for its anthropomorphic air intake and because he felt it epitomized middle-class domesticity, whether through the image of his homemaker mother or of the “Hoover man” peddling products door-to-door. Befitting this interest in salesmanship, Koons also plays with conventions of display, which he learned firsthand in his father’s home decorating store. Artworks, like consumer goods, often depend on lighting and cases to heighten their allure. By bathing these humble vacuums in an otherworldly glow, Koons recaptures the ardent desire and almost religious excitement that the newest products—and artworks— can inspire. Yet, almost paradoxically, these perfectly preserved specimens have inevitably grown dated, suggesting that the inexorable quest for the “new and improved” is inherently shadowed by obsolescence.
