Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

If with Banality Koons proposed to liberate his audience from the stigma of bad taste, with Made in Heaven he promised nothing less than emancipation from the shame of sex. The billboard from 1989 announced a feature film that Koons planned to realize with the world-famous porn star Ilona Staller (also known as La Cicciolina), whom he hired to pose with him on her sets. Although Koons ultimately decided not to make the film, he fell in love with his costar and produced a body of increasingly explicit work in which the pair played a contemporary Adam and Eve surrounded by symbols of fidelity and affection, such as dogs and flowers. Koons’s work and public relationship caused a media sensation, which climaxed with the couple’s marriage and the opening of Made in Heaven in New York. To this day, the work stands not as pornography but an extremely risky and vulnerable form of self-portraiture as well as an enduring experiment in fame.