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.
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 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.
If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.
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.
I’m interested in power.
Nothing can touch me now – I’m Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !
I’m always working. If I’m not in my studio I become quite nervous.
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 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.
I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.
I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.
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.
I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.
I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.
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’m really not a person who consumes a lot. I don’t have a sports car.
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.
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.
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.
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.