Nothing Is Lost by Ingrid Sischy

Author:Ingrid Sischy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

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After college, which included an exchange year at the Art Institute of Chicago—where he met Paschke—Koons moved to New York City. This was 1977. Within two weeks he got a job at the Museum of Modern Art. Lots of artists work in museums, particularly when they start out—it’s almost an initiation rite, and the list of artists who have worked at MoMA reads like a who’s who. But the few years that Koons spent manning the Modern’s membership desk in its front lobby have become legendary. Koons relished his interactions with the public and the opportunities to get visitors excited by art. He was a kind of half performance artist, half salesman, and he invented all sorts of getups to attract customers. He dyed his hair red and would often cultivate a pencil mustache, after Dalí. His inventory of outfits included paper bibs, loud polka-dot shirts, a double tie that he’d match with a sequined jacket. One of his favorite accessories was an inflatable flower—the kind that you buy at a toy store or variety shop. He’d wrap it around his neck, and it attracted people like a magnet. This inflatable was actually related to the art project that Jeff was working on in his two-room apartment on East Fourth Street. In the playfully subversive spirit of Marcel Duchamp, who had turned everyday objects such as urinals into art pieces (which he called readymades), Koons was experimenting with all sorts of store-bought colored inflatable flowers and inflatable bunnies, combining them with plastic, Plexiglas, and mirrors to create what are now considered his earliest serious artworks.

These lowly inflatables would eventually lead to some of Koons’s most brilliant, iconic work—and they also helped him stand out at his job at the Modern. But while his sales techniques may have been popular with the public, they weren’t a hit with everyone. William Rubin, then the chief curator, who had enormous power at the institution, was one person who could have lived without the Bob Hope–like entertainment factor that Koons was bringing to the serious matter of art appreciation. Koons says that on a number of occasions, when visiting dignitaries were expected at the museum, the museum’s director, Richard Oldenburg, had the task of telling Koons to beat it. “He was always very nice about it,” Koons remembers. “He’d say something like ‘Jeff, we really appreciate what you’re doing, but we wonder if you’d mind not coming into work just for tomorrow.’ ” While Oldenburg doesn’t remember having to ask Koons to leave, he does recall him fondly, and remembers that, despite whispers of Koons’s flamboyance, he sold five times as many memberships as any other salesperson.

Plenty of others who watched what went on at that desk could tell that Koons had a big future, and he had no shortage of job offers, especially in sales. One of these offers helped give Koons the courage finally to leave the museum in 1980, when he was twenty-five. He got himself licensed to

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