When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.
I'm interested in power.
Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.
I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.
I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.
Art was something I could do better. It gave me a sense of self.
I'm interested in power. I'm interested in the kind of polarities and equilibriums that take place within sexuality and philosophy and sociology. So in Versailles, in this type of setting, you have a place that is about absolute control, where everything has been thought about.
I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.
I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.
I don't like being naïve about the market, and I always try to make things as great as I can. Then I hope that there's an audience that enjoys them, and that hopefully those things get protected.
I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.
A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.
I'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.
When I view the world, I don't think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.
It's wonderful to make a lot of money, to be able to take care of my family, to have the facilities I have and really support the people the studio's involved with. But at the end of the day I'm quite simple as an artist-it's really about the power of art.
The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.
Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.
If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.
I want my work to be accessible to people.
My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.
I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.
I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.
Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.
I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.
I don't think irony is about judgment; I think irony is something like, "Oh, that's interesting," because it's not something I think one starts off to achieve. I think it's just something that presents itself. And if it does, I find it's usually optimistic, not negative in its terms.
My favorite activity is to be with my family.
I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.
As an artist, I've always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.
Even before I had children I wanted the intensity of my life to get greater. I wanted to feel things more strongly. I wanted my intellectual parameters to expand. But it comes back to your own desire to be engaged and to live up to your parameters.
I would prefer a normal-sized breast, or a small breast or whatever, and that it be natural, than to understand that it was just some jelly in there.
My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves.
I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.
For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, its perfect. You dont have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. Thats where its found. Its found within you.
I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.
I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.
I learned a lot about the images of pornography and how much they dealt with close-up, when a person is at their most vulnerable and having to reveal details about themselves. I wanted to combine the eternal in two different manners. There is the biological eternal - here is our species reproducing - and then the transparent, spiritual aspect of it.
I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.
I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.
I think about my work every minute of the day.
I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.
Nothing can touch me now - I'm Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !
I try to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.
I believe in sensuality. I believe in sex. I believe in the survival of the species. I like aspects of things that are ethereal, but I like the reality of nature and embracing the way nature works, and aspects of interrelationships between male-female, aspects of the body, the way the body has changed over thousands of years . . .
Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.
The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.
If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.
As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.
Art helped give me confidence.
The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.
I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.
The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.
Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.
I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.
Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.
Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.
A photograph for me does not have a sense of spiritual seduction, it does not have an essence, that this is something that permeates and which is eternal through time.
People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.
I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.
It's about the production of the work. I need my workers to stay focused.
Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.
I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.
The entertainment industry, the advertising industry have taken [the] tools from the art world and made themselves much more politically potent. We are really devastated and very impotent right now. A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist.
Anything you can do to protect the public and allow it to have the confidence that our financial controls are good is very, very positive.
I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.
I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.
I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.
