Carl Swanson’s excellent New York Magazine cover story on Jeff Koons contains this succinct and accurate description of what happens in the narrow working space at the apex of the Contemporary art market:

The circle of collectors and dealers is so small and so awash in cash that the process can seem to an outsider a bit like a rigged game, in which a bad deal can be considerably more valuable than a good one. If you buy a giant balloon toy for $30 million, you may have spent a few million more than you had to or even expected to; but you’ve set the value of that work and also elevated the value of all of the balloon toys in your collection. Which is especially good, since there aren’t very many people who can afford to spend $30 million on a giant balloon toy, and those who can tend to take pleasure in cornering a market.

Jeff Koons Is the Most Successful American Artist Since Warhol. So What’s the Art World Got Against Him? (New York Magazine)

Laura Gilbert has discovered a number of works owned by Jeff Koons on display at the Met in New York. In the process, she’s also discovered a website that appears to be a catalogue of Koons’s collection based upon works that are already known to be owned by the artist.

Working backward from the list, we find three Picasso’s that were bought at the height of the art boom for a combined total of $51.68m, a substantial amount of money even for wealthy artist like Koons.

Superstar Koons’ Sideline: Loaning Old Masters to the Met, Including the Dreadful. Meantime, 51 of His Own Holdings Appear Online (Art Unwashed)

Picasso, Deux Personnages (Christie’s)

Picasso, Dora Maar Tete de Femme, 1941 (Christie’s)

Picasso, Le Baiser (Sotheby’s)

The San Francisco shop Park Life has won its stare-down with Jeff Koons’s lawyers. Kate Taylor tells the epic drama:

On January 20, its lawyer, Jedediah Wakefield of Fenwick and West, working pro bono, sued Jeff Koons LLC in San Francisco federal court, asking the court to declare that Park Life wasn’t infringing on Mr. Koons’s i rights. “They very quickly indicated they weren’t interested in putting up a fight,” Mr. Wakefield said of Mr. Koons’s lawyers. Ultimately, Jeff Koons LLC agreed not to pursue the gallery for the sale of the bookends, and the gallery agreed not to indicate that the bookends were by Mr. Koons, which, Mr. Wakefield added, “they hadn’t done and weren’t going to do anyway.” As a result of the deal, he said, he was planning to file on Thursday for a dismissal of the declaratory judgment suit.

All Bark, No Bite: Settlement Reached in Balloon Dog Dispute (Arts Beat/New York Times)

There’s a clever charity, RxArt, that puts art in the rooms where patients are undergoing the stress and fear of a CT scan. Mike Argento tells the story of how Jeff Koons came to donate work to a hospital where he’s from:

And while RxArt is happy with the artists it works with, it has always sought the great white whale of the modern art community — Jeff Koons.

“We’ve worked with some major artists in the past,” Sebastian said. “Jeff was the ultimate dream for us. We really wanted to work with Jeff.”

Koons — a Dover native — is, it almost goes without saying, huge. His work is shown around the world. His sculpture, “Hanging Heart,” sold in 2007 for $23.6 million, then the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. He broke that record the following year when another work, “Balloon Flower,” sold for $25.7 million. His work regularly sells for multiples in the seven figures and is featured in some of the world’s great art galleries. He is an institution.

It seemed daunting — a small nonprofit dedicated to cheering up hospitals getting one of the leading figures in modern art to donate some work to its cause. It turned out to be easier than they thought. [Read more...]