It's true: Jeff Koons really IS a tool.
It's true: Jeff Koons really IS a tool.
by JOHN HOGAN
I am a senior at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. This school has the longest goddamn name of any art school, ever. When people ask me what the name of my school is, I try and get away with "This art School in Baltimore," but they invariably ask if it's part of U of B, and I must answer with an emphatic no. Then I usually end up just saying the whole thing. Within the school we call it MICA, which sucks just as much as saying the whole name, so you can't win.
I'm going to graduate in two months. I'm gonna get a Bachelor of Fine Art degree. Yeah. The school tradition here is that you wear a beret instead of one of those caps with a plateau on top. They try and convince us to buy these ridiculous, humiliating, fake-cartoon-caricature-of-what-we-are hats by telling us that it's a rite of passage for artists that graduate from the school. Yeah, I got another rite of passage for graduates from MICA: BEING POOR.
Okay, I shouldn't really say that. MICA's got some famous dropouts: Jeff Koons and David Byrne. These men are tools, however. Someone that is famous and who actually graduated from MICA is Donald Baechler. He's not like Basquiat famous or anything, but he's in this new book called "ART at the MILLENIUM" or something like that, and his paintings are within the same tome of 100 artists that "matter"--people like Damien Hirst and Matthew "Planet Hollywood Principle" Barney. (One good thing about being in art school is that you can think of obscure nicknames for famous artists that only other art students consider funny because no one else understands or will ever give a shit.)
Baechler asks people to draw little pictures for him on scraps of paper in bars and stuff, and then makes these drawings really big on a canvas, juxtaposing (art-school vocab word--10 points) them with more realistic-ish paintings of onions and stuff, on the same canvas. He usually commissions someone else to paint the onion or whatever other thing that's supposed to be more realistic. In a way it's fail-proof painting because he's not really responsible for how it looks in the end. After all, it's not His drawing of a girl in a black dress, and he didn't paint that onion. I'm not trying to knock him, I'm just saying that's how it's good art. It's sort of complicated and you can't really make judgements on aesthetic qualities because the artist didn't do very much of the arting, or whatever. Conceptually, it's solid, I guess, because it's populist and depersonalized, while at the same time it appeals to regular people's desire to look at stuff like kids and vegetables and beach balls--you know, actual things.
So it's all a big fucking riddle. This guy is successful because he figured out the most complicated and expensive way to make a stupid image, which is exactly what the art world wants and needs to carry on it's supreme decadence and corruption. What's the point? I guess the point is, don't watch Basquiat and think that Andy Warhol was an okay guy and that Basquiat was this primal image guy that just made ingenious shit. Basquiat got dropped by Mary Boone after she got him addicted to inhuman amounts of drugs and being rich in general---Why? Because he had no actual skills. He was trying to draw from the old masters by the end of his career, but he couldn't draw well enough, so he just died. The art world is an evil monster, but much in the way that, say, the music industry is. You shouldn't watch Rattle and Hum and think U2 are these artists with vision either, but you already knew THAT. Still, everybody likes the Joshua Tree, as well they should, but nobody thinks Bono is actually smart. Same goes for artists. You get famous because you're stuff has the potential to be expensive, and maybe 5% of it is in some way innovative. Just like rock music. Umm, that's it.
Donald Beachler makes art out of ice cream and pizza killers.