Art and Culture in the Bush Era

vruz: because it was not only the economy, healthcare, foreign policy, and the constitution that Bush vandalised.  His administration, with the highest contempt for any expression of intelligence and humanity also pervaded many other areas of human development, not only the the basic ones of staying fed and free. the effects will be still felt for decades to come. I believe Jeff Koons’ crap epitomises it,  it’s the single most outstanding reflection of this practice never seen before that was commonplace only during the bush administration, which serves to explain the strong feelings I have voiced about his pseudo-art.  how many schools and hospitals have people been left without for the extreme banality and vanity of the powerful few ?  we haven’t still begun to understand it for real and its true impact.

Newsweek: Jeff Koons, Art and Culture in the Bush Era

Koons’s art has been putting a smiley face on the high-end art market since all the way back in the administration of President Bush 41, with such works as a huge, tacky ceramic figurine of “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988). He continued the practice with a stainless-steel blowup of a “Balloon Dog” during the Clinton years. But his art didn’t really enter the cultural pantheon (museum retrospectives, record auction prices) until the reign of Bush 43. Koons’s art looks the way Bush’s pronouncements frequently sound: amiably banal at first glance. But as with the president’s simple answers to tough questions, there’s a lot of power—art-market power, in Koons’s case—backing him up.

image courtesy: dtybywl:

Paris 2008 - Château de Versailles - “Jeff Koons Versailles” on Flickr - Photo Sharing!