Jeff Koons: High king of middlebrow
Despite being perhaps the most famous and successful American artist since the late Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons is surprisingly egalitarian about his work and its impact. “What I try to do every day of my life is to make an object that you can’t make any judgment about,” he said during a lecture and discussion Tuesday evening in tandem with Robin Kelsey, dean of arts and humanities at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), where the event was held. Praised and criticized for the approachability of his work, Koons said he deeply values “acceptance” and removing the barriers that prevent many people from embracing art. It’s an impulse he said was prompted by the acute embarrassment he felt as a young art student during a visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art when he realized he didn’t know much about the...