Passion

Www 1stlivenude Sites Live En Video Games St Live Nude Jeff Koons - The Artist and the Art of Others - NYTimes.com

Www 1stlivenude Sites Live En Video Games St Live Nude

Sites uSTAR233 1stlivenude hsearch 1stlivenude r-searchi Www t Video r 1stlivenude cl 1stlivenude dsearcht%E4%B8%A4%E5%A4%A7%E7%BE%8E%E5%A5%B3%E9%AB%98%E8%B7%9F%E4%B8%9D%E8%A2%9C%E6%8B%B3%E4%BA%A4 Live h Games t Www M Live .K Games o Games s%E4%B8%A4%E5%A4%A7%E7%BE%8E%E5%A5%B3%E9%AB%98%E8%B7%9F%E4%B8%9D%E8%A2%9C%E6%8B%B3%E4%BA%A4c 1stlivenude nnsearchcsearchs Www in Video h Video ssearcho Video nSTAR233tsearchi Www k Games n Sites Video bousearch searchuc Www searcho 1stlivenude kSTAR233 a Live eSTAR233p Www e Video tsearchfsearchl Games to Www tsearche Www psearchisearcht Live f Video esearchm Live n, Live a%E4%B8%A4%E5%A4%A7%E7%BE%8E%E5%A5%B3%E9%AB%98%E8%B7%9F%E4%B8%9D%E8%A2%9C%E6%8B%B3%E4%BA%A4dsearchh Sites rdesearch Www o se 1stlivenude Games h 1stlivenude Video o Sites m Games o Www searchn %E4%B8%A4%E5%A4%A7%E7%BE%8E%E5%A5%B3%E9%AB%98%E8%B7%9F%E4%B8%9D%E8%A2%9C%E6%8B%B3%E4%BA%A4n Www lt%E4%B8%A4%E5%A4%A7%E7%BE%8E%E5%A5%B3%E9%AB%98%E8%B7%9F%E4%B8%9D%E8%A2%9C%E6%8B%B3%E4%BA%A4be Live lb Www tsearchrsearchcsearchnsearchs 1stlivenude m Games ltsearchn Games o Games slynsearchmsearch-searchh Video c Www Sites u Sites h Www m Sites ,searchDsearchl Video # Games 3 1stlivenude ; Sites and Hsearch Video . Sites W Video st Video rmsearchnsearch,t 1stlivenude e Video ec Live en Www rsearchcChicg 1stlivenude cusearchpsearchosearch.searchAsearchDa Games &# 1stlivenude 37 otif appearing in the new paintings, the image of a draped cloth from a 1969 work that Mr. Koons owns, leads him back to a painting he says he believes was the clear model for the cloth, “Venus Rising From the Sea — a Deception,” by Raphaelle Peale, America’s first notable still life painter (a work of whose Mr. Koons just missed out on buying at auction), which leads him forward again to Dalí’s last painting, “The Swallow’s Tail” from 1983, in which Mr. Koons said he can discern the form again, all but hidden.

Mr. Koons has collected since the beginning of his life as a professional artist, even before he could afford to pay for work. In the late 1970s, working in Chicago as a studio assistant for the painter Ed Paschke — working so hard to impress him, he said, that his fingers sometimes bled as he was stretching canvas — he traded a drawing for a Paschke print, which still hangs in his home.

By the late 1980s, as his star and his bank balance rose precipitously, he began to collect high-end work by artists he loved, like Lichtenstein, but he was forced to sell a lot of it during an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with his first wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller. Those troubles, overlapping with a treacherous period in the late 1990s in which he and his backers almost bankrupted themselves trying to create elaborate stainless-steel sculptures, forced him to stop collecting altogether for a while.

But as his fortunes roared back in recent years, he began pouring a significant amount of his wealth into building a collection, joining high-profile contemporary artists like Damien Hirst and John Currin in concentrating heavily on old masters and 19th-century works. Mr. Koons’s choices are stylistically and historically diverse but tend to share a preoccupation with the body and sexuality, which is also a major theme in Mr. Joannou’s collection and Mr. Koons’s take on it, in a selection of more than 100 works by 50 artists. (The creepily corporeal title Mr. Koons coined for the show is “Skin Fruit,” a riff on a vulgar title of a work by the collective that calls itself assume vivid astro focus.)

Even by the standards of the art world, where language about art strays easily into deep and enigmatic waters, Mr. Koons’s way of explaining his own work is hard to take seriously, though he has always seemed to take it that way. With an ever-present warm smile and the comforting tones of a guidance counselor, he has spoken about how art “lets you kind of control physiology and the secretions that take place within the body,” how his art operates in “a morality theater trying to help the underdog,” how his balloon-based sculptures, at least sexually speaking, “really try to address whatever your interests are.” In a profile of Mr. Koons in The New Yorker in 2007 Calvin Tomkins observed that “it is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.”

The same might be said of the way Mr. Koons explains his reasons for collecting. He does so with a boyish excitement, rapid-firing requests to assistants at big computer screens to pluck images from his own collection or from anywhere in millennia of art history. His grasp of the historical details he cites is often shaky, but such precision doesn’t seem to matter much to Mr. Koons. His visual memory, on the other hand, often feels boundless, like a human version of image search. “I could do this all day,” he said at one point during two long visits to his studio.

What drew him to the Courbet bull, which he bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007, one of four paintings he owns by that artist? (Mr. Koons doesn’t like to talk about prices, but since he buys mostly at auction, they are more or less public; the Courbet bull, for example, went for $2.5 million, and the entire collection is easily worth more than 10 times that. It resides mostly in his bedroom for safety’s sake; he and his wife, Justine, have four young sons and a fifth child on the way.)

“I like this type work,” he said simply about the Courbet, then pointed to a brown patch on the bull’s fur vaguely shaped like the state of New Jersey and explained that he stares at the patch often and wonders whether it might represent “some form of, you know, soul or really a personal part” of Courbet’s own being. His main fascination with Knüpfer’s “Venus and Cupid” seems to be the spilled chamber pot at Venus’s side. Looking at a Manet nude, he talks about his appreciation for the “lack of violence” in Manet’s work and refers on separate occasions to a crease in the nude’s stomach, which he believes resembles a long-tailed sperm.

Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, said in an interview that one reason she and the museum’s curators made the unusual decision to hand the Joannou show over to Mr. Koons was precisely because of his unconventional and compulsive way of looking at art, what the New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni calls his “radical scopophilia.”

In work sessions as the show came together, Ms. Phillips said, he would use examples of work, new and old, “pointing to things that often would be the peripheral things in them, things that you might not see that were actually the things that were the most interesting to him — a monkey under someone’s foot, something like that.”

“He falls in love with these things; he’s obsessive,” she said, adding that as he began this month to install selections of work on the museum’s top floor — by Charles Ray, Tauba Auerbach, David Altmejd, Liza Lou, Kara Walker and others — she began to see exactly how unusual the show would look. “I don’t think many curators would have chosen those particular works to share that space.”

But some in the art world worry that because of the nature of Mr. Joannou’s collection itself, built primarily from the work of highly visible international art stars (Mr. Koons has selected only one of his own works), Mr. Koons’s adventurousness might have little room to play. Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art and the organizer of the 2007 Venice Biennale, said that artist-organized shows often succeed because of the way artists find the “oddments” that trained curators, pursuing a more historical and formal mission, overlook.

“But in this case it’s very hard to see how the show could possibly result in that because this collection is already so much of a piece,” said Mr. Storr, who is also a painter, adding that in his opinion Mr. Koons’s taste in art is more unorthodox than Mr. Joannou’s, and that he would be more intrigued to see what Mr. Koons would do if invited to rummage around in the Met’s storage rooms.

It’s an idea that Mr. Koons would probably embrace with his trademark smile and some kind of pleasant, if strangely platitudinous, pronouncement. Standing in his studio next to an image of a radiant Poussin from his collection that practically leapt off a computer screen, he said, “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.”