[Reader-list] Patti Smith: Jeff Koons "vile", "just litter upon the earth"

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

Moneyshot quote from Patti Smith interview...

TAN: Do you get the chance to follow much contemporary art?

PS: If I have time I’m more likely to go to the opera than schlepping
round the galleries. Also a lot of things I see lack soul, they might
be clever, or well done, but it’s like the difference between
listening to Theola Kilgore or one of the great R&B singers then
having to listen to Britney Spears. Somebody like Jeff Koons I think
is just litter upon the earth, I look at his stuff and I’m appalled, I
can’t access where these people are coming from.

TAN: Though it’s theoretically in a direct line from Duchamp.

PS: Duchamp I can look at and I see poetry and intellect, I don’t see
this “cleverness”. I’m not interested in just commentary or humour.
For me art isn’t just commentary, maybe I look at art in the old
fashioned way, to me art should take us to a place we have never been,
to see something we’ve never seen. I can’t look at a Koons giant dog
and be moved.

TAN: But he is trying to be genuinely populist.

PS: Look, let the populace be “populist”. To have to try to be
“populist” is pathetic, that is not what we should be trying to do
with art. I find Koons’s work especially vile, to go into Versailles
and have to look at his silliness all through that magnificent
building. By contrast I recently helped organise a show in Florence
combining Michelangelo’s work and Robert’s photographs of nudes and of
sculpture, and I do see some kind of relationship.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=17086