It was a rather modestly sized audience that gathered last Saturday morning at 11 a.m. in Cooper Union's basement Great Hall to see newscaster Peter Jennings interview the 47-year-old New York artist Jeff Koons. The morning repartee kicked off the annual Art Walk NY fund-raiser put on by the Coalition for the Homeless, so everyone was full of a charitable spirit. Except that Jennings seemed not particularly sympathetic to Koons' work. "How did you like being called a 'master of kitsch' and a 'self-promoter'," he asked early on. "It was very painful," Koons answered earnestly, a tone that he maintained throughout. "I just tried to keep my work pure to my objectives."
Koons is a good salesman for his own work, and he explained what he was after in some of his more sensational pieces (in the vacuum cleaners he sought "the darker, masculine side of consumerism," and his explicit color photos of love scenes between himself and his ex-wife Ilona Staller, otherwise known as Cicciolina, an Italian porn star, were meant to express a romance of everyman and everywoman. "My work has always been collage, so I thought I'd collage myself into my own work." For those who look for secrets in an artist's childhood, Koons noted that his father had run a furniture showroom, and that he was always seeing things displayed.

The conversation had several bizarre highlights. Jennings asked Koons if it was true that he admired Michael Jackson more than anyone -- Koons apparently made such a statement in the past -- and Dan Graham asked from the audience whether Koons thought Jackson was gay. Jennings parried by asking to reserve the question for later. (Later never came, though a slide of Koons' ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, which sold last year at Sotheby's for $5.6 million, did eventually go up on screen, and Koons said something about it representing the speed of evolution.) Koons volunteered that he admired Jackson because "he would do anything for his work, but ended up a tragic figure."

The artist also brought up his former wife and spoke at length about their divorce and child-custody dispute. "My ex-wife has a borderline personality disorder," he offered by way of explanation. "All ex-wives have borderline personality disorders," joked Jennings. Koons remained serious, and told the audience that his son Ludwig, now 10 years old, was "abducted" by his ex in 1994, and that in a "tremendous injustice by the Italian judiciary" he is not allowed to see him or talk to him on the phone. He hopes that his son will look back on some of his recent works with childlike imagery and realize that "my dad was thinking of me."

Koons also said that as a result of the clash, he had sought out and destroyed "60-some" works from the "Made in Heaven" series, the images of he and his wife having sex. He also talked about the 200-foot-long backdrop he made for the currently touring Rolling Stones stage show, which included images of female underwear stretched across the stage ("to create tension"), a trash can flying through the air, and a cascade of oversized corn kernels. Keith Richards was to be positioned in front of the corn, and had Koons remove five kernels from the mural, since he didn't want to be completely surrounded by corn when he played.

From artnet, we all love mr koons.