Jeff Koons: The 60 Minutes Interview

Jeff Koons is one of the most prominent and polarizing art stars in the world perhaps you've seen one of his giant balloon dog sculptures or the stainless steel inflatable rabbit he made that resold for 91 million dollars a few years ago the highest prize ever paid at auction for work by a living artist I bought a much less expensive work of his at a charity auction about 10 years ago his Creations may look simple but they can take decades to make and often push the boundaries of technology and sometimes taste critics May scoff at times but that's nothing new Jeff Coons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago the story will continue in a moment you'll find the largest collection of Jeff koons's work at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles visiting it is like showing up at a strange children's party long after the kids have gone to bed there's a giant painting of a party hat a porcelain Michael Jackson and his chimp bubbles a kind of Pop Culture pieta the Hulk even makes an appearance the star attraction a 10 foot tall stainless steel balloon dog sculpture I believe the first piece showed it to us after hours we had to make machines to make this work they didn't exist it may look like it's filled with air but balloon dog weighs more than a ton and took Jeff Kuhn six years to make I started with a balloon and I blew it up I twisted a balloon doll did you know how to make a balloon dog no I just got a little book and I saw how you do it so I twisted up I probably made about 50 of them and I made a mold of it and then that was used to make the stainless steel pieces you know originally when I made this piece I thought that I could make it for about three hundred thousand dollars which still that's a lot of money but it ended up just to create the piece ended up costing me 1.6 wow and that was more than what I had sold the work for that's classic Coons he's famous for going over budget and his obsessive attention to detail is legendary he spent 20 years figuring out how to turn this mass of aluminum into a 10 foot tall pile of Play-Doh to get these basketballs to appear suspended in air he Enlisted the help of a Nobel prize-winning physicist and he used more than sixty thousand living flowers to create this 40-foot sculpture of a puppy Coons often takes famous characters or artworks and plays with them adding a gazing ball to the Mona Lisa or he elevates everyday things making them larger shinier or surreal versions of themselves the Rapids from 86 86 like that rabbit resold a few years ago for 91 million dollars he made four that look at first as if they're just plastic Inflatables but they're highly polished stainless steel and weigh about 150 pounds it's iconic because it can represent so many different things I can think of Easter I can think of a politician with a kind of a microphone somebody making proclamations I can think of a Playboy rabbit but I think one of the most important things to me the reason it's reflective and reflecting you reflecting me you know the viewer finishes a work of art it's it it's about your feelings your experiences it's about your potential maybe you're thinking Jeff Kuhn sounds like a phony self-help Prophet plenty of critics do but he does see art as something that can help people have a personal transformation art can be anything I mean it really can be my personal experience of art is that you just don't have to bring anything to it other than yourself so your message to people is you don't need to have a thesis in art history to interact with art and what you feel from it is valid it's as valid as anybody else could experience why balloon dogs why gazing balls an inflatable rabbit memories you know around Easter time I would see a lot of inflatable rabbits in The Yards I would see gazing balls in people's yards in their Gardens our neighbors who do that I mean how generous they are for us that we're just driving by or walking by and we can look and we can have a little all in wonderment just for that a second to me they're symbols of cultural history Coons grew up outside York Pennsylvania in a rural community where you can still find gazing balls in people's yards he has eight children six with his second wife Justine to whom he's been married for 21 years they still live part-time in Pennsylvania in kunz's grandparents house part of an 800 Acre Farm where they raise horses and cows I think most people don't Envision that this is the life you have as a world famous artist yeah well you know I'm very involved with my my work but on the weekends and Summers holidays it's a really important part of my life Kuntz has been drawing and painting since childhood in 1974 while studying Arden College his mother helped him meet one of his favorite surrealist painters my mother called me and she said I just saw in a magazine that Salvador Dali spends half his year in New York City at the Saint Regis Hotel and uh I thought oh okay maybe you know I'll call and you just thought you'd call them and I called the Saint Regis I asked for Salvador Dali's room and they put me through you know I was quite nervous but I told him I was a fan and that I would enjoy very much to meet him and he said can you come to New York this weekend on Saturday and I said yes he said be in the lobby at 12 o'clock and I'll meet you there and he was spectacular it would never have occurred to me to like just call Salvador Dali at his hotel room I had nothing to lose you know Coons and dollies spent the afternoon together and at the end of it he asked the world renowned artist to pose for this picture I remember he put his mustache up and he was telling me you know a kid hurry up I can't hold this pose all day but I left New York that evening feeling like I could do this after finishing school he hitchhiked to New York and started making art in his Lower East Side apartment buying cheap plastic Inflatables and putting them on mirrors Coons had Grand Ambitions but he needed cash to realize them So eventually I became licensed and registered to sell Commodities and mutual funds and so you know that's what I started to do to be able to make more money to make the works that's not a career move a lot of artists make well you know I did it only that I could make enough money to make my vacuum cleaner pieces the vacuum cleaners he's talking about were what first got him noticed in 1980 he bought about 20 brand new vacuums and displayed them in cases with fluorescent lights it was part of a series called the new I was showing them for their newness that this was a brand new object it was never used you can see that it's clean it's pristine its lungs are pure and there's also some sensual aspects to it too the consensual aspects Central I mean you had the handle and you have uh the bag right there it could be looked at as masculine or you could look at it and say oh you know the bag is the womb art definitely is in the eye of the beholder what did you think of Jeff Coons as an artist when he first sort of came on the scene I was interested in him and I also was kind of repulsed by him Robert store former dean of the Yale School of Art was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it acquired some of coons Vacuums in 1996. I think some of the work is really unpleasant but it doesn't mean it's not serious what's unpleasant about it the imagery is is vulgar okay now vulgar means many things means of the people rather than of the elites so it's taking an object which the New York Elites might look at and think oh that's tacky that's yeah that's trashy that's something you buy in a in a gift shop and it's blowing it up and making it perfect and saying that this has value it has meaning not necessarily value but it has meaning what is the message of that the message is that it is there to be embraced that it is not to be mocked that one should not be smugly sure of One's Own taste to the point of denying the possibility of other tastes and is he being honest about that I think he's being totally honest and I think that he has made all of that fair game in a way that we have not seen since Marvel I come down like Andy Warhol Jeff Koons has a factory of sorts with an assembly line of painters meticulously following his instructions and dozens of digital assistants sculptors and Craftsmen all over the world helping make his complex pieces which are often inspired by very simple things this is like a very modern grandmother's closet turns out Coons was fascinated by his grandparents porcelain figurines as a child and has collected hundreds of them where did you find this I found it online he decided to make this hundred and fifty dollar ballerina into a multi-million dollar eight-foot tall marble sculpture but it wound up taking him 12 years first he used a cat scan machine to digitally map every detail of the figurine inside and out then it took him five years in the help of MIT scientists to begin translating all those details into instructions for machines to carve the sculpture the actual carving took another seven years now the work will really progress quickly because we went with coons to a workshop in Pennsylvania to check on the progress found a Yami aoyama and her team carefully polishing the ballerina by hand do you have a sense of how many hours of work is done on a piece 33 000 33 000 hours before just the handwork it must be exhausting I mean the level of detail and monotony and difficulty of it is incredible yeah it is like a really unique job I would say that looks like a sort of a dental tool what is that what is it yeah that's nail polisher that you know the great ladies sucks yeah these are you'll notice Jeff Koons isn't doing the sculpting or painting he comes up with the ideas and sets the standards but his Artisans do the labor which has led to criticism including from our own morally safer so what do you say to the man 30 years ago Morley did a story critiquing Contemporary Art and likened Coons to a PT barno selling to suckers he doesn't actually paint or sculpt he commissions Craftsmen to do that or he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners is that a legitimate criticism it's a legitimate criticism if you look at Art in a way that you're kind of want everything to be done by the artists themselves but it becomes very limited what you can do within one life if you're being responsible for everything it's like the production of this program right now Anderson if you had to be responsible for the lighting if you had to be responsible for editing I was responsible for the lighting you would we wouldn't see you or myself but if you'd have to be responsible for everything I mean how many programs would you be able to create I've designed worked on the systems so that the whole process at the end of the day it's as if every Mark was made by myself at 68 Coons has reached a level of Commercial Success few artists ever imagined he's helped design cars for BMW an album cover for Lady Gaga even a super yacht that one angle and later this year he hopes to create a permanent Art Exhibit on the moon we've made 125 small stainless steel Moon sculptures and mounted them on a lunar lander that'll hitch a ride aboard a SpaceX rocket is there something about the atmosphere on the moon that would affect the lifespan of a work yeah I I almost everything uh you know you have tremendous radiation you have the temperature change at least 250 degrees difference from night to day and one of the most inhospitable environments that uh you know you could imagine for a work of art the moon sculptures are for sale of course along with an nft or non-fungible token which serves as digital proof your artwork is actually up there you'll also get one of these larger moons to show off here on Earth he won't say how much it'll cost you but with Jeff Coons it's a safe bet the price tag will be out of this world

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 60,055

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, jeff koons, art basel, 60 minutes prince harry full interview, jeff koons balloon dog destroyed, 60 minutes full episodes 2023, jeff koons balloon dog, jeff koons for kids

Id: 0j2YLsVg9mk

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023