“Artist” Jeff Koons Scams $8 Million for Coloring Book #4

"Artist" Jeff Koons (left) and Owner of the Sacramento Kings, 

Who Will Go Unnamed to Save Him Further Embarrassment

The latest Jeff Koons (born 1955) assault on public taste and mores just arrived in sunny Sacramento, CA.  And in doing so, he made a cool $8 million.  Nice work if you can get it.

The sculpture, Coloring Book #4, was just set into place outside the Golden 1 Center, standing on a pedestal near what will be the main entrance of the arena’s northwest corner. 

Coloring Book #4 is 18 feet tall, and is part of his Coloring Book collection, a series the artist said was inspired by the (hardly Renaissance-worthy) notion of a child coloring out of the lines of an image of Piglet.

Just take a moment to let both the money involved and the inspiration to sink in.  Good?  Let’s proceed.

As the huckster artist explained to The Sacramento Bee in 2015: I hope that a piece like Coloring Book can excite young children who are going hand-in-hand with their mother and father and with their sisters and grandparents to a sporting event (at the arena), that all generations can find some contemplative interaction with the piece.

Or something.

Most of this latest attack on public taste was funded by the Sacramento Kings; the city of Sacramento also threw away $2.5 million for its share of the public financing of the Golden 1 Center.  (This money came from the Art in Public Places program, which clearly has a very loose definition of both “art” and “public places.”)

I must make it clear that my disgust with this has little to do with city fathers spending $8 million on art.  Actually, I think city, state and federal governments should increase arts spending, not cut them.  Art spending increases, say I!

What I find so clearly offensive is spending money on bad art, or worse still, non-art.  Think, for a moment, about “public art projects” (for want of a better term) of earlier times, and compare them to the rubbish pushed down our throats today.  Where are projects with the sobriety, seriousness and artistic virtuosity of the Jefferson Memorial, the Tower of Pisa, Notre Dame … good heaves, we could even make a case for Mount Rushmore… 

But we do not create public work like this, mainly thanks to Modernity’s flight from beauty, the decadent and debased language of contemporary art criticism, and the sick influence of money by uneducated, tasteless collectors.

Let’s look at this $8 million piece of “art.”  It says … nothing.  It is a towering, misshapen mess, made of reflective material that mirrors its surroundings, but does not comment or improve upon them.  Even for the sake of argument, Piglet is invisible (for those Pooh fans hoping to salvage something from this debacle); and the contours and colors have no power of suggestion or reference.

Had Koons spent $1.95 on a bellows to blow color-tinted bubbles, the result would be much the same.  Here is a work without intelligence, without virtuosity, and without any internal coherence.  Simple human ethics should shame him out of the field of artistic endeavor, and make his name a byword for chicanery, hucksterism and bad taste.

Our feelings about Koons are best summarized by the late, great art critic and humanist Robert Hughes (1938-2012), who wrote (about including Koons in a new program on art): Jeff Koons [is included]: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush's America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan's. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton's on the topography of Hell: "And in the lowest depth, a lower depth") but for the moment they aren't apparent, which isn't to say that they won't crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton's lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.

The United States is filled with artists, great artists, doing great work.  Work that really is about transcendence, connecting us with the sublime, and fostering the better parts of our basic humanity.  Why do we reward the Jeff Koons of this world, and not them?  When will art replace hucksterism, and when will the public rise in a body and reject this junk?

We have recently arrived on the West Coast, having left a New York where countless people spend a significant amount of time urinating on public art.  It may be the most base and unhygienic mode of criticism I have come across, but they were doing they best they could.  And looking at Koons’ latest ‘masterwork,’ the memory brought a warm, yellow glow.

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus with Decorations by Mark Burgess

Regular readers of The Jade Sphinx know of our deep and abiding respect for that extremely difficult art form, children’s literature.  Those who neither understand nor respect this exacting art form do not appreciate just how difficult a task it is.  However, when children’s lit is touched with something like genius, then the result is something that can be savored by children and adults alike.

Critics cite the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne (1882-1956) as the last great contribution to the first wave of children’s classics; a period ranging roughly from the Victorian era through the early 1920s.  Milne approaches something close to the sublime in his stories – they are delightful nonsense that, upon reflection, actually make a great deal of sense.

Milne’s genius was to take the stuffed animals owned by his son, Christopher Robin, and create a whole imaginary world in which they could live.  The animals, Pooh, Owl, Rabbit, Eeyore, and Kanga and Roo, all have well-defined personalities and (sometimes obsessive) character traits.  There is a distinctly … English flavor to the Pooh books, almost as if Milne brought a child’s-eye view to one long, summer tea party.  In the hands of any other less-gifted author, Pooh would be too sweet and indigestible by half; but Milne creates a world of remarkable charm, gentle kindness and great humanity.  In the simplicity of Pooh and those around him, we often see the best (and most ridiculous) parts of ourselves.

Milne was blessed in his illustrator, E. H. Shepard (1879-1976), who created a series of delicate and subtle drawings to enliven the corpus.  Those who know Pooh only through the sometimes garish Disney interpretation are missing the subtlety and quiet of the originals.  Shepard also drew the definitive illustrations for Wind in the Willows, so he was instrumental in the success of two great classics of the genre.  (Sadly, later in life, Shepard thought Pooh overshadowed his more serious work…)

Milne ended the Pooh books with a beautiful coda of Christopher Robin growing up, and putting aside childish things while promising to always have a special place in both his heart and his memory for the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood.  It was a masterful way to preserve the integrity of his creation, while assuring that it would also always be alive to anyone who could open themselves to childish wonder. 

So, it is with a bit of surprise that the Trustees of the Pooh Property Trust would think that a sequel, some 80 years after the fact, was either necessary or desirable.  But in 2011 the Trust entrusted the property to author David Benedictus (born 1938), and the illustrations to Mark Burgess (born 1957), who sought to emulate Shepard’s style.  The results were, at best, mixed.

Pastiche is a ticklish thing to pull off.  (Your Correspondent has been guilty of literary pastiche himself.)  While it is possible to imitate a voice, it is nearly impossible to imitate genius.  As a result, the new writer seeks to introduce something new and original to separate the new work from the original; but then … when individuality is introduced, there is no longer any point to the pastiche.

Benedictus is tasked with having Christopher Robin return from boarding school (fortunately, there’s no mention of the 80 year lag; Robin must be the most abominable student!), and beguiling a summer idyll with his old friends at the Hundred Acre Wood.  Now older, he involves his friends in a spelling bee, cricket, and playing school.  This is all right in-and-of-itself, but where Benedictus fails is that his work is Milne and water: sometimes he gets the tone just right, but when he doesn’t the whole enterprise comes crashing down. 

Not that there aren’t moments to savor.  I had a smile for most of the reading, and found much of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood charming.  However, Benedictus bows to contemporary tastes a little too often, and the note is jarring. 

For example, he introduces a new character, Lottie the Otter, clearly as a sop to political correctness, seeing that the only other female in the tales is the motherly Kanga.  Lottie never works for a moment; she is too contemporary a creation to blend seamlessly with Pooh and company, and the character is fairly obnoxious, to boot.

So, despite many inspired moments (Benedictus seems to understand both Owl and Rabbit very well), we often feel that someone is trying to breathe life into a creation not their own.  And while the drawings by Burgess are certainly serviceable, but no one would mistake them for Shepard.

Pooh buffs should stick with the originals; but for the casual reader, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is undemanding fun.

Here is an except from the opening:

Who started it? Nobody knew. One moment there was the usual Forest babble: the wind in the trees, the crow of a cock, the cheerful water in the streams. Then came the Rumour: Christopher Robin is back!

Owl said he heard it from Rabbit, and Rabbit said he heard it from Piglet, and Piglet said he just sort of heard it, and Kanga said why not ask Winnie-the-Pooh? And since that seemed like a Very Encouraging Idea on such a sunny morning, off Piglet trotted, arriving in time to find Pooh anxiously counting his pots of honey.

“Isn’t it odd?” said Pooh.

“Isn’t what odd?”

Pooh rubbed his nose with his paw. “I wish they would sit still. They shuffle around when they think I’m not looking. A moment ago there were eleven and now there are only ten. It is odd, isn’t it, Piglet?”

“It’s even,” said Piglet, “if it’s ten, that is. And if it isn’t, it isn’t.” Hearing himself saying this, Piglet thought that it didn’t sound quite right, but Pooh was still counting, moving the pots from one corner of the table to the other and back again.

“Bother,” said Pooh. “Christopher Robin would know if he was here. He was good at counting. He always made things come out the same way twice and that’s what good counting is.”

“But Pooh . . .” Piglet began, the tip of his nose growing pink with excitement

“On the other hand it’s not easy to count things when they won’t stay still. Like snowflakes and stars.”

“But Pooh . . .” And if Piglet’s nose was pink before, it was scarlet now.

“I’ve made up a hum about it. Would you like to hear it, Piglet?”

Piglet was about to say that hums were splendid things, and Pooh’s hums were the best there were, but Rumours come first; then he thought what a nice feeling it was to have a Big Piece of News and to be about to Pass It On; then he remembered the hum which Pooh had made up about him, Piglet, and how it had had seven verses, which was more verses than a hum had ever had since time began, and that they were all about him, and so he said: “Ooh, yes, Pooh, please,” and Pooh glowed a little because a hum is all very well as far as it goes, and very well indeed when it goes for seven verses, but it isn’t a Real Hum until it’s been tried out on somebody, and while honey is always welcome, it’s welcomest of all directly after a hum.

This is the hum which Pooh hummed to Piglet on the day which started like any other day and became a very special day indeed.

If you want to count your honey,

You must put it in a row,

In the sun if it is sunny,

If it’s snowy in the snow.

And you’ll know when you have counted

How much honey you have got.

Yes, you’ll know what the amount is

And so therefore what it’s not.

“And I think it’s eleven,” added Pooh, “which is an excellent number of pots for a Thursday, though twelve would be even better.”

Tolkien Will Never Be a Hobbit With Me

We here at the Jade Sphinx spent the Christmas holidays reading The Hobbit, written in 1937 by J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973).  It was the sole blot on a wonderful season.

I should state here that I have been reading – with great satisfaction and complicity – works of science fiction and fantasy for more than 40 years.  In my high school days (or, perhaps, daze), Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was pressed into my hands by appreciative classmates, and I was never able to get beyond the mid-point of the second novel.  I have been allergic to hobbits, trolls, orcs and dwarves ever since.

As I reached my middle years, I have become more and more fascinated by the great works of children’s literature, books that I missed entirely during my actual growing up.  I did not read Wind in the Willows (1908) or Peter Pan (1911), or the Pooh or Oz books until well into adulthood.  Friends insisted that The Hobbit was a classic children’s novel, one of the most important of the 20th Century, and that I could not seriously say that I have read deeply in the field until I have digested this book.

My misgivings were exacerbated by the spate of recent truly awful film versions of Tolkien’s books.  I had an uncontrollable fit of the giggles during the first Lord of the Rings film (exploding into loud hilarity when I saw Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen beat up one-another), and the visuals of the films never quite gelled with the fleeting mental pictures I had made while trying to read the books.  I always think of hobbits as sort hominid rabbits, and seeing well-known actors in big-foot shoes and Mr. Spock ears does not quite gibe with my mental image.  We left the first film after the mid-way point, and kept our distance from all others until the recent first-film of The Hobbit series, and saw, with disappointment, that things never got any better.

But, on to the book.  The Hobbit deals with Bilbo Baggins, a member of a race of little people called hobbits, who travels away from his comfortable home in the company of dwarves to kill a dragon called Smaug and retrieve the treasure Smaug stole from the dwarves.  They are accompanied by a wizard, Gandalf, for the first and final halves of the journey – he is unaccountably absent from the hazardous middle-section.

At the end, dragon dead and dwarves reunited with gold, various groups of dwarves and elves and men, now in conflict over the treasure, band together to defeat a marauding band of goblins.  After much death and slaughter, Bilbo returns to his country home, a sadder but wiser hobbit.

In summary, it sounds like an interesting read, but the entire book is rendered a thudding bore by Tolkien’s lugubrious, turgid literary style.  Tolkien struggles to give his work the cadence of fairy tale or baldric epic, but succeeds only in creating faux-King-James-Bible or slightly rancid Kenneth-Grahame-knockoff. 

It is amazing that Tolkien, who made his career as a philologist as well as a professor of English Language and Literature, should have such a tin ear, but there it is.  Listening to The Hobbit read aloud (as I did to my better half during much of the holiday), is to experience a particularly donnish deconstruction of a tale created to excite into something quite bland and uninteresting.

The sections of The Hobbit that I enjoyed the most were those passages in the early part of the book where Bilbo Baggins is at home.  Hobbits, it seems, like good food (and lots of it), pipes and tobacco, a wee dram of something every now and then, warm homes and a life close to nature.  In short, all the best things found in Wind in the Willows and the Pooh books.  I actually love that part of the book … and certainly wish there was more of it.  (I dimly recall the opening birthday party scene of The Lord of the Rings, and hoping the books would get back on track with that – to no avail.)  As soon as the ‘adventure’ starts, my sympathy evaporates.  Tolkien obviously shared my sympathy for a pre-Industrial world, but the quest tale he creates for his ancient world invariably disappoints.

More telling, too, is that Tolkien often writes himself into a corner and then takes the easy way out.  Gandalf seems to have extremely limited powers for a wizard (he seems to be quite good with fireworks, and that’s about it), and the one time Gandalf can actually do some good, Tolkien absents him from the action while he is away on “other business.”  Worse yet, for a coming of age story, Bilbo uses his ring of invisibility much too often to keep himself out of any real danger; indeed, during the climactic battle, he spends most of his time literally invisible on the sidelines, keeping out of trouble.

Tolkien also drapes his cultural prejudices a little too thinly.  Clearly hobbits are the rural English, caught up in outer-world events not to their tastes and beyond their control.  The avaricious dwarves seem uncomfortably Jewish to this reader, and the wood elves a bit too much like gypsies.

Some wag at The New Yorker has called The Hobbit The Wind in the Willows Meets The Ring of the Nibelungen, and I can’t seem to top that.