The Princeling Of Kitsch

By ROBERT HUGHES

EXHIBIT: JEFF KOONS

WHERE: SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

WHAT: MIXED-MEDIA SCULPTURES AND WALL PIECES

THE BOTTOM LINE: Koons adds a depressing footnote to Pop art with his self- promoting devotion to gloss and glitz.

The Jeff Koons exhibition on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until next week -- it goes to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in July -- is a fairly grim spectacle. It is, so to speak, a consomme double of cliche: first because the work is more kitschy than kitsch, and second because it has been so often reproduced and discussed by a sensation-hungry and ideology-obsessed art world that its shock value has gone flat. The first time you go into a gallery and see a 7-ft.-high toy bear in a striped T shirt inspecting the whistle of a London cop, all done in painted wood, faithful to the last hair, by some European souvenir manufacturer -- Koons, who probably couldn't carve well enough to do his own initials on a tree, makes none of his stuff himself -- the effect is, well, fairly unsettling. The second time you see it, it's just another Koons. The third time, boredom supervenes.

By now, Koons' work is so overexposed that it loses nothing in reproduction and gains nothing in the original. It is pure stasis. Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol's Rosemary. There is no artist in whom self-advertisement and self-esteem are more ecstatically united than Koons: he makes even Julian Schnabel, who recently proclaimed himself to be the nearest thing America has to Picasso, look like a paragon of self-effacement. He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.

Koons has, however, made a contribution to American culture in the form of comedy: the sight of so many critics, dealers and museum folk peering into the demitasse of his talent and declaring it an oracular well whose contents address issues, as the phrase goes, of class, race, money, sex, obscenity, beauty, power and desire. Art is short, bibliography long. Clearly, we are in Madonnaland, where every publicity hound -- oops, semiotician of mass culture -- must have his day in the museum.

At the start of his career, about 14 years ago, the world was not ready for Koons. He made his first works, inflatable plastic flowers bought in a dime store and set in front of mirrors, without many people noticing. A second group of objects, vacuum cleaners displayed in highly lighted Plexiglas cases, failed at first to excite the indifferent collectors. How could this be? "I've always loved sales," Koons remarks in the catalog, "and to me, being a salesman is being very generous to the public because you're meeting the needs of the people."

Thwarted in his desire to unload this philanthropic instinct on the art world, he spent a few years as a Wall Street commodities trader. But even as he languished in exile, the art market changed. By 1986, it was full of new collectors ready to believe that practically anything could be the Wave of the Future. The Hoovers were hoovered up. Then came some aquarium tanks in which basketballs floated, weighed down by a solution of Epsom salts and water to neutralize their buoyancy. These rather banal objects still strike Koons' fans as veritable icons of mystery and memory. "They are . . . dead things," writes curator John Caldwell, "and we realize with a shock that that is what they are for us as well, something from the past, our own youth, familiar once and fraught with memories. . . It suddenly dawns on us that we have not touched a basketball for many years." Gag me with a madeleine, Marcel!

Koons' work is a late footnote to Pop art that relies on one obsessive device: the exaggeration of the aura of consumer objects, a devotion to gloss and glitz. An ice bucket or a set of "limited-edition" whiskey bottles in the form of a choo-choo train is recast in stainless steel; a porcelain effigy of Michael Jackson with his pet ape is slathered in bright gold glaze. Once in a while, Koons contrives an image of curious intensity, such as Rabbit, 1986, a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable plastic bunny, once pneumatic, now rigid and manically shiny, possessing some of the virtues of Claes Oldenburg's work 20 years before.

In general, though, Koons' work simply repeats the debased polychrome baroque of kitsch religious sculpture in an inflated and condescending way. "Love me," the stuff says. "I'm your culture." Koons' way of looking radical to the highly acculturated is to play a tease: Don't you really prefer silly knickknacks to Poussins or Picassos? Don't you long for the paradise of childhood, before discrimination began? "Don't divorce yourself from your true being," he wheedles in the catalog, in the accents of a quack therapist. "Embrace it. That's the only way you can truly move on to become a new upper class . . ." One may be permitted to demur, especially when the call to regression comes from an artist so transparently on the make.

Of late a certain desperation has entered Koons' output -- or so one might judge from a series of paintings and sculptures titled Made in Heaven. They depict Koons having various forms of sex with his wife Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star-politician who rose to fame under the name Cicciolina. The results range in size from small glass figurines to a photo-based mural. The centerpiece is an over-life-size carving of Cicciolina and her swain in rapture, like Adam and Eve, with a giant python curled around their plinth. As pornography, these works are inefficiently winsome; as art, wholly inert beneath their gaudiness.

In a wall label that prepares the eager visitor for the X-rated room in which these tidbits are displayed, the museum points out that "the artist and his wife function in a manner not unlike the vacuum cleaners," which is true, though not perhaps as meant. The text compares the "shocking" character of Made in Heaven to other once shocking works of the past, such as Courbet's Burial at Ornans, Matisse's Woman with the Hat and Manet's Olympia. And yet it adds, "All this is not to say that Koons' art is equivalent to the greatest work of Manet or Matisse, or that of Jackson Pollock . . ." What a failure of nerve! How can such slurs be left hanging in the air? At least the curator might have specified just which non-greatest Matisses or Manets Koons' work is equivalent to, quality-wise. Justice and public enlightenment demand no less.