Jeff Koons crap sucks balls

Well we kinda knew that already, but now Tom Freudenheim of The WSJ seems to agree.
You know I don’t take everything critics say at face value, but I’m happy to see a few had the integrity to denounce Koons.
I can’t imagine what comes after the doggie-shaped gigantic balloons.
(and those didn’t even make it to the Chicago retrospective, had that crap been included, it would have surely have given more material for critique)

A Tarnished Jeff Koons

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

August 30, 2008; Page W10
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In an act of self-congratulation and loyalty, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is commemorating its 1988 first survey of the work of Jeff Koons with a retrospective of about 60 works (through Sept. 21). Yet a small companion show, “Everything’s Here: Jeff Koons and His Experience of Chicago,” makes a stronger argument for the museum’s collections than for Mr. Koons.

The retrospective exhibition exudes hype and money, which may be what the artist means when he says, perhaps ironically, that he wants “to give the viewer a sense of economic security” — though one is tempted to ask: whose? The shock and awe that seem to be Mr. Koons’s primary weapons are no more effective as an artistic strategy than as a military one.
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The retrospective presents too little art and too much information. The MCA tells us, for example, that Mr. Koons “employs approximately 90 people in a 27,500-square-foot studio in New York.” I’m reminded of my tour at Schloss Neuschwanstein (that Disneyesque castle in Bavaria), where the guide kept insisting that the kitsch decoration was important art because of all the hours workmen spent producing it. Studios and assistants have long been commonplace (think of the immense output of Rubens). But Mr. Koons appears primarily engaged in the challenges of fabricating his ideas (or are they the ideas of some of those 90 people?) — and therein lies his greatest success. One has to admire the technical prowess on display in the stainless-steel sculptures, if not in the banal carved wooden ones. Alas, the recent paintings, such as “Triple Hulk Elvis I” (2007), suggest that the artist has run out of ideas but needs to keep supplying his gullible gallery and collectors; even the fun quotient has been lost here.
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