Top 85 Koons's Quotes
#1. If you want to look at a cheap shot, look at Mr. Koons's or Mr. Gober's art. By no definition is it art.
Morley Safer
#2. Mr. Koons's work has always inspired architects, which I think is very interesting. I think he is an artist who has reinvented himself so many times and reinvented so many different series.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#3. Koons's work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values.
Jerry Saltz
#4. I'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.
Jeff Koons
#5. I want my work to be accessible to people,
Jeff Koons
#6. When I view the world, I don't think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.
Jeff Koons
#7. I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.
Jeff Koons
#8. For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.
Jeff Koons
#9. The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.
Jeff Koons
#10. It's about the production of the work. I need my workers to stay focused.
Jeff Koons
#11. The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.
Jeff Koons
#12. I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.
Jeff Koons
#13. Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.
Jeff Koons
#14. When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.
Robert Adams
#15. I think artists are always investigating how to have an economic, political platform. At one time, artists were supported by the Church. Then they were supported also by the state.
Jeff Koons
#16. The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.
Jeff Koons
#17. I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.
Jeff Koons
#18. I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.
Jeff Koons
#19. It's wonderful to make a lot of money, to be able to take care of my family, to have the facilities I have and really support the people the studio's involved with. But at the end of the day I'm quite simple as an artist-it's really about the power of art.
Jeff Koons
#20. Brothers, why are you here?" He looked
astonished, even perturbed.
"We come to help."
"I thought the monks and priests were to be in the church, praying."
"We pray with our feet," answered Anseau.
"Tell us how we can help.
D.W. Koons
#21. As an artist, I've always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.
Jeff Koons
#22. I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times ... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.
Jeff Koons
#23. Amanda Cardinale, Abby Koons, Emily Sweet, and Sharon Krassney also deserve my thanks. I appreciate all that you do. The Cyrus family deserves my thanks not only for welcoming me into their home, but for all they've done with the film. And a special thanks goes to
Nicholas Sparks
#24. I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.
Jeff Koons
#25. Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.
Jeff Koons
#26. People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.
Jeff Koons
#27. I think if I met Frank Auerbach or Jeff Koons, I'd be more wobbly than if I met Robert De Niro!
Russell Tovey
#28. Anything you can do to protect the public and allow it to have the confidence that our financial controls are good is very, very positive.
Jeff Koons
#29. Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.
Jeff Koons
#30. I try to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.
Jeff Koons
#31. Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.
Jeff Koons
#33. From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.
Jeff Koons
#34. Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.
Jeff Koons
#35. I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.
Jeff Koons
#36. The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.
Jeff Koons
#37. I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.
Jeff Koons
#38. I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.
Jeff Koons
#39. I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.
Jeff Koons
#40. Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.
Jerry Saltz
#41. As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.
Jeff Koons
#42. If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.
Jeff Koons
#43. Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.
Jeff Koons
#44. The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.
Jeff Koons
#45. Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.
Jeff Koons
#46. I think about my work every minute of the day.
Jeff Koons
#47. 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 then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show.
Jeff Koons
#48. I don't think irony is about judgment; I think irony is something like, "Oh, that's interesting," because it's not something I think one starts off to achieve. I think it's just something that presents itself. And if it does, I find it's usually optimistic, not negative in its terms.
Jeff Koons
#49. Art was something I could do better. It gave me a sense of self.
Jeff Koons
#50. A photograph for me does not have a sense of spiritual seduction, it does not have an essence, that this is something that permeates and which is eternal through time.
Jeff Koons
#51. I would prefer a normal-sized breast, or a small breast or whatever, and that it be natural, than to understand that it was just some jelly in there.
Jeff Koons
#52. Pretty mundane closet, but a lot of ties. And I tend not to throw anything out, so I have a lot of clothes from all times from my life. I can be a little sentimental with things like that.
Jeff Koons
#53. Nothing can touch me now - I'm Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !
Jeff Koons
#54. I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.
Jeff Koons
#55. I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.
Jeff Koons
#56. I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.
Jeff Koons
#57. When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.
Jeff Koons
#58. Even before I had children I wanted the intensity of my life to get greater. I wanted to feel things more strongly. I wanted my intellectual parameters to expand. But it comes back to your own desire to be engaged and to live up to your parameters.
Jeff Koons
#59. I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.
Jeff Koons
#60. Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.
Jeff Koons
#61. I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.
Jeff Koons
#62. The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.
Jeff Koons
#63. I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.
Jeff Koons
#64. I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.
Jeff Koons
#65. If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.
Jeff Koons
#66. A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is ... not about economics at all.
Jeff Koons
#67. Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.
Jeff Koons
#68. If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.
Jeff Koons
#69. I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.
Jeff Koons
#70. Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.
Jeff Koons
#71. A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.
Jeff Koons
#72. I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.
Jeff Koons
#73. I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.
Jeff Koons
#74. Jeff [Koons] called me because he'd seen a portrait of David Bowie, at the beginning of the 80s - I've known Jeff for a long time - and he said, Greg, I want to look like a high-profile celebrity, living on the edge. I think that says it all.
Greg Gorman
#75. I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.
Jeff Koons
#76. I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.
Jeff Koons
#77. I'm interested in power. I'm interested in the kind of polarities and equilibriums that take place within sexuality and philosophy and sociology. So in Versailles, in this type of setting, you have a place that is about absolute control, where everything has been thought about.
Jeff Koons
#78. My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.
Jeff Koons
#79. My favorite activity is to be with my family.
Jeff Koons
#80. Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he's the biggest, best, or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he's the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you're talking about the wonderful, wicked, lovable, and annoying creatures known as art dealers).
Jerry Saltz
#81. I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.
Jeff Koons
#82. I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.
Jeff Koons
#83. I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.
Jeff Koons
#84. When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.
Jeff Koons
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