Do you like the Rabbit or do you think it is kitsch? Was the $90 million that someone paid for it at auction a sign of the vitality of our culture or its decadence? Is Koons a super talented guy or someone so bad that as Robert Hughes once said of him, “He could not carve his name in a tree?”

These are the kinds of question that commonly arise in response to Koons’ work. And that’s the problem. By focusing on the merits of the work, that is the product, we are blinded to what the success of Koons and a slew of artists like him actually represent.

It would be misleading to think of the Koons phenomena as the phenomena of a single person. Koons and Hirst and others like them are but faces on a relatively new but misunderstood art system regime that has essentially killed off the artist as unitary author. Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson and well know curator, once said that painting, and we can generalize to include all art made by a single person, is at its most fundamental level, a process of becoming. This may have been true from the middle ages on up until World War II; and it may be true for people like you and me who still labor away with brush in hand with easel before us. But we don’t count. We are unimportant even if we do manage to survive within bottom-basement markets that cater to much ridiculed public sensibilities and refrigerator magnets. It’s not that we don’t have our exhibitions and prizes, magazines, and big money markets. We do, pretty much like the Global Wrestling Federation. But I’m telling you, we ride the wind of decades past. We’re dead, killed off by the Koons Regime and even if you have a comfy niche somewhere, know that your ability to pay the bills has an expiration date.

The Magic of Expression

Just the other day, a painter friend of mine was explaining how when she just looked at her still life for extended periods, in an almost absent-minded gaze, hints of color seemed to emerge, flicker, and then change or disappear. I knew what she meant. Anyone who paints from nature and responds to visual sensations is likely to have felt this vibrating energy – and is likely to have been moved by that oneness with what she sees.

The next step, however, is the one filled with magic: she tries to mix the hint of color that she saw and felt and with her hand and with her brush she touches the canvas. In other words, as a single person, as a unitary author, she acts. It is in that move from the shadowy world of color in her mind to a clear stroke of color on the canvas, a color that she chose, that she makes manifest, precisely in that moment of time, who she is. In that moment, she realizes a feeling that she could not have possibly known prior to the act, a feeling of being larger, a feeling of power, a feeling of self-realization as a unitary author. The tingling, breathtaking surge of life that passed through her, down through her hand and brush then passes on to the canvas allows the world to know and feel who she is. And it is in that moment of creativity that she receives the entire payoff of being an artist. This is the magic of unitary author expression, from Da Vinci, on through Beethoven, and now you and me.  But in the upper strata of cultural power and wealth management known as the art system, access to self-worth and this particular kind of fulfillment has been utterly frustrated by the Koons Regime.

Here’s the kicker. When work is properly organized, as a process of becoming, artists remind us that work is not just fulfilling, but that it may be among the most fulfilling of human experiences. “I need to work to feel well,” noted Manet. Cezanne argued that external rewards were not the reason he painted: “The pleasure must be found in the work.” Wolf Kahn, a recently deceased painter said, “I don’t need a feeling of success. I just need an appetite to work to feel alive.” A friend of Matisse noted that “Matisse couldn’t live if he couldn’t work.” As unitary authors, we get that. But what if we had to work under the division of labor that marks all the organization of work in all capitalist countries, where work is separated into planning and execution, where the planners are the “idea men” who direct the people who execute the mindless work. What would we become if we were so directed? Adam Smith had an answer. He said that “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations…always the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention….loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and…becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become….” Is it no wonder that most people who labor under this relationship thank God that it’s Friday and dream of early retirement.

Arrival Of The Idea Man

After Abstract Expressionism ran its course, artists began bringing that very division of labor into the studio. A key starting point was the career of Frank Stella, an artist from the Second Generation, New York City School. He began making paintings, as would a house painter, using the tools, materials, and techniques he had learned as a house painter. However, he said that he didn’t want to be an artist per se. Rather, he wanted to be known as someone with the “capability of making art.” This was another way of saying, as Caroline A. Jones notes, that he wanted to be an “ideator-executive: the designer of diagrams and plans that the artist-worker could execute” or more simply as Stella would call it, an “executive artist.”[i] In other words, an executive artist as studio boss would direct or control the work of his worker-artists, nominally referred to as “assistants.”  “All the structures, values, feelings of the whole European tradition…[it] suits me fine if that’s all down the drain,” crowed Stella. In other words, it wouldn’t bother Stella and the regime behind him if all the fulfillment attached to the unitary-authored moment of creativity went down the drain as well. Not surprising. Executive artist types or idea-men-bosses need a feeling of success, not an appetite to work, to feel alive.

In addition, during the 1960s, the teaching of visual art was moved from the studio of the master-artist into the university. The notion of the studio with master as unitary author was not only abandoned but reviled. With the death of traditional painting at the rarified heights of major art fairs like the Venice Biennale along with the master-artist-studio-system, the studio as factory or the large-scale factory as studio soon followed. I find it interesting that this colossal shift in the making of art and what it means to be an artist was not resisted by artists but embraced. Andy Warhol, who helped pioneer this studio metamorphosis would proudly proclaim: “somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.”

One of Jeff Koons’ workers wrote an op-ed piece complaining that he was a serf doing paint by numbers. But he was mistaken; his problems at the art factory were not due to a feudal mode of production. They were due to the free enterprise system, with artists-as-entrepreneur or as “idea men” as Koons likes to present himself to the world.

And so it goes. Stories of Koons laying off workers in a rather brutal fashion and/or replacing some workers with robots often grace the art news. This is not an aberration, of course. This is only the expression of what any number of recent major artists have enthusiastically supported whether it be Warhol’s vision of “Business Art Business” or his desire “to be a machine,” Stella’s executive artist fantasy, or Hirst’s branding and product lines using mass production workers.  “America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew….I think the meaning of my work is that it’s industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become,” noted Roy Lichtenstein, in 1963. Many other major artists (Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, are a few that Jones mentions) have bought into the studio as factory and executive artist as boss.

We ought not to accept art system arrangements because we have inherited them nor should we accept the authority of people who just happen in our time to hold power. One thing that working as a unitary author does besides providing a source of self-worth and fulfillment  is that it incentivizes independence. I get a tickle every time I read Monet’s declaration: “I can’t care less what so-called art critics think. They are all as stupid as one another. I know my worth.” And yet, it is rather discouraging knowing that today the notion of artists-as-entrepreneur or as idea-man or “as-assistants” is unreflectively accepted, even celebrated. Paraphrasing James Baldwin, it is not unlike watching people cling to their captivity.

[i] Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 124