33 Artists in 3 Acts Read Online Free Page A

studio like this,” he says, his blue eyes twinkling through wire-rimmed glasses. “I enjoy being able to provide. When I was younger, I was always the guy who paid for the beers.”
    Koons conducts studio tours for collectors, curators, critics, writers, and TV crews with some frequency, and so he follows a script of sorts. He mentions how he was brought up to be “self-reliant” and tells a story from his childhood about going door to door, selling chocolates and gift wrapping paper. “I enjoyed not knowing who was going to open that door. I never knew what they would look like,” he says. “I was always someone who wanted to be engaged. It’s the same with being an artist.” I’ve read and seen a lot of interviews with Koons; he rarely gives one without airing this thought about the artist as door-to-door salesman.
    We walk into a space that contains six large canvases in different states of completion, hanging on windowless walls. Under the high ceilings and rows of fluorescent lights are many two-tier wooden scaffolds on wheels. It’s lunch break, and only one woman persists in painting. She sits cross-legged on the upper deck of a scaffold, listening to her iPod, her nose a few inches from the canvas, a thin paintbrush that leaves no visible strokes in her left hand. Koons composes his paintings on computer, and his assistants execute them through an elaborate system of paint-by-number maps. A single painting is said to take three people sixteen to eighteen months to complete.
    The Koons studio is quiet and industrious—nothing like Warhol’s “factory,” where people acted out wildly on drugs and became stars in his underground films. Koons does not see himself as greatly influenced by Warhol, even though he appreciates that “Andy’s work is very much about acceptance.” He also admires Warhol’s use of repeated images and his large-volume series, which he links to the quaint view that creativity—and fecundity—result from the same life force. “Fora gay man,” he says, “Warhol’s relationship to reproduction is very interesting.”
    From the beginning of his career, Koons hasn’t just made art; he has made shows. He is adept at creating fully realized bodies of work that are more than the sum of their parts. He is also careful about producing enough work, but never too much. His series are confined to editions of three to five sculptures, a number that renders his work appealingly collectible. One of the most consistently coveted series in Warhol’s oeuvre are his 1964 40 × 40-inch portraits of Marilyn Monroe, which come in five distinct colors: red, blue, orange, turquoise, and sage-blue. As it happens, Koons’s “Celebration” sculptures, which have commanded his highest auction prices, also come in five “unique” color versions.
    Koons doesn’t like to talk about his market because he feels that he is misunderstood as “commercial” or motivated by profit. “I don’t mind success,” he says, “but I’m really interested in desire.” When I suggest that commercial motives are attributed almost automatically to artists who command high prices at auction, he replies swiftly, “They don’t say it about Lucian Freud or Cy Twombly or Richter.” To any question related to money, Koons opts for safe answers. He defines his market, for example, as “a group of people who realize that I am very serious about my work.”
    The artist’s diligent avoidance of market talk is second only to his aversion to discussing politics. In a segment for Japanese television, Roland Hagenberg caught the artist off-guard. “You don’t seem to be a man who cares about politics in art?” inquired the documentary filmmaker. “I try to do things that are not harmful to my work,” replied Koons. Indeed, overt political content could likely put a damper on his success in stimulating “desire.”
    While many of the works in progress here spring from older series, three paintings announce the