In celebration of the forthcoming fifth season of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, broadcasting this October on PBS, each week we bring you a video clip from a featured artist’s segment. Up next is artist Jeff Koons. Read a detailed explanation of Koons’s work back on Art21’s blog here.
Jeff Koons plucks images and objects from popular culture, heightening our awareness of the prevalence of fantasy and desire in our society. About his sculptures, he explains, “anything that reflects has a kind of spiritual transcendence because it involves the viewer. It acknowledges your presence. Every time you move, the reflection changes; it always acknowledges you.”
This video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Fantasy, premiering on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Fantasy features four artists—Koons, Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, and Florian Maier Aichen—whose art defies convention and transports us to unreal worlds and altered states of consciousness. With works at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime, each of these artists pursues a vision first held in the mind’s eye, inventing and re-imagining along the way.
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