Jeff Koons Research Paper

Jeff Koons is an American contemporary artist born in 1955 in Pennsylvania.

A major practice of Koons is his liking to take everyday, commonplace objects and putting them interestingly in installations. He got his expertise in Baltimore at the Maryland Institute College of Art, obtaining his M.F.A. He ended up getting more of an education at the School of the Art Institution of Chicago after seeing an exhibit of Jim Nutt, who attended the same school. Eventually Koons obtained a doctorate there, but is still known to have said that one exhibit really sparked him to want to go there in the first place. He once said in an interview, “I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist,...it was

Center in Greenwich, Connecticut. It is one in a series of five, with other

! colors in the series -- yellow, blue, magenta and red -- owned by financier art

! collectors Steven A. Cohen, Eli Broad (whose "Balloon Dog (Blue)" is on

! display at LACMA), Francois Pinault and Dakis Joannou (Abramovich).

The balloon dog was not the first of Koons’ works to hit pop culture itself. The same article states that his piece been featured on the cover of Lady Gaga’s album “Art Pop”. This being a suitable name to associate Koons with because he mixes together so many styles including pop culture and conceptual, although he has stated numerous times that his works hide no other meanings than what they put forward.

! His work has hit other places just as hard as his hometown country. Slightly before he entered into working on the balloon animals in his what he called “Celebration series”, he completed work in Bilbao. He was commissioned to create a piece and what resulted was “Puppy” at the Guggenheim.

! A behemoth West Highland terrier carpeted in bedding plants, Puppy

! employs the most saccharine of iconography—flowers and puppies—in a

! monument to the sentimental. Imposing in scale, its size both tightly