Jeff Koons Must Die!!! The Video Game from Hunter Jonakin on Vimeo. Hunter Jonakin programmed and designed this brilliant, cheeky, subversive FPS (first person shooter) video game that allows the player to roam a museum filled with pop artist Jeff Koons’ installations and art pieces…and destroy them with a BFG while dodging guards. The playable…
A couple of months ago I wrote about La Bolleur, a group of artists who created a series of brightly-colored, large-scale balloon animals I felt verged on a rip-off of Jeff Koons famous “Balloon Animals.” While those pieces didn’t create enough of a buzz to rouse Koons into a battle over intellectual copyrights, no doubt you’ve read about the little bookends that did. Though that lawsuit has ended with the bookends still legally for sale and Koons back where he was when he started, the case has raised plenty of compelling questions like, who, if anyone, owns the rights to popularized images and is Koons just a mean ol’ copyright bully?
La Bolleur’s latest installation at the Eindhoven city center brings two words to mind: Jeff Koons, maybe four words if you add “Balloon Dog.” Like Koons’ “Balloon Dog” series, La Bolleur’s balloon dogs are bright and playful oversized versions of the real thing. The only difference is that La Bolleur’s are soft and Koons’ are made of metal and came out 16 years ago.
Photos from Coolhunting.com
“Murakami Versailles” opens today at the 17th-century French palace, and surprise, surprise: some French are offended. It’s probably the same stuffed shirts that reacted to Jeff Koons 2008 installation, and I’m willing to bet that this time around their petitions will have about the same impact, which is to say none at all.
Photos by Michael Tropea. Copyright Jeff Koons
RxArt, the brainchild of art dealer and curator Diane Brown, has enjoyed great success pairing artists with hospitals in order to transform them into more welcoming and calmative environments. In the past, the nonprofit has worked with Ed Baynard, John Margolis and R. Crumb, who created a series of kid-friendly coloring books. But Brown admits they’ve always wanted to work with Jeff Koons, whose big, bright pieces are a natural fit for children’s wards. Koons himself has been involved with children’s charities, donating his fee for designing this year’s BMW art car to one. So when RxArt asked him to take the sterile, white CT scanner room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital just outside Chicago and turn it into something that would “soothe and cheer young patients and brighten the potentially frightening testing environment,” Koons jumped at the chance, taking no fee for his painted 2D recreations of his iconic Balloon Dog, Hanging Heart, Donkey and Monkeys.
You don’t have to be a gear head to appreciate Jeff Koons’ design for BMW’s 17th artist collaboration, a tradition dating back to the seventies that includes artists Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Robert Rauschenberg and more recently, Olafur Eliasson. Koons revealed the finished car, an M3 GT2 with a warp-speed striping effect, in France two days ago. Koons will donate his artist fee to a children’s charity, and will double that amount if the car wins.
Though today is its official birthday, the San Francisco MoMA has been celebrating its 75th year with an Anniversary Show that opened in 2009 and will run until 2011, highlighting works from its outstanding permanent collection that runs the gamut from Braque, Brancusi and Bourgeois to more recent acquisitions from Olafur Eliasson and Ron Arad. SFMoMA not only boasts an impressive collection, but also the bragging rights associated with mounting Jackson Pollock’s first solo museum exhibition in 1945 and collecting early works of then unknown and often controversial artists like Jeff Koons, Frida Kahlo, Bruce Conner and Larry Sultan.
The BMW Art Car tradition began in 1975 when French driver Hervé Poulain invited his friend, artist Alexander Calder to create a canvas on the car he would drive later that year at Le Mans, the seminal 24-hour Formula One race. Since then, 18 other artists have been invited to create their own art cars for BMW,…
In partnership with London’s Tate, director Mike Figgis has made a series of 3 minute short films around the museum’s “This is Sculpture” project which is an “ambitious and challenging look at the rich history of modern and contemporary sculpture, presenting major works of art from the Tate Collection across two floors of the Gallery.”…
Versailles is perhaps one of the last places you would expect to open its palace doors to contemporary artists, and certainly last year’s Jeff Koons show met with its fair share of controversy. Stuffy patrons protested at the gates and said silly things like “contemporary art fosters distraction and destruction of the perfect whole.” Luckily, a few noses stuck up in the air isn’t enough to deter the annual project, which features Xavier Veilhan this year.
Web Designer Depot is compiling a collection of Michael Jackson tributes created by various artists and designers from around the Web. Your mileage may vary with some of the results, but what is clear is that the King of Pop’s impact reverberated far beyond simply the world of music.
Jonathan Monk’s “The Inflated Deflated” installation takes a cheeky aim at Jeff Koons, specifically his iconic “Rabbit” sculpture, as well as the “deflating” contemporary art market.
See more images from “The Inflated Deflated” exhibit…