Jeff Koons
If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.
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 am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.
I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.
I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.
Pretty mundane closet, but a lot of ties. And I tend not to throw anything out, so I have a lot of clothes from all times from my life. I can be a little sentimental with things like that.
I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.
One of the reasons I work with technology the way I do is that I can really be assured that the vision I have from the outset is what will be at the end. And that that vision isn't altered through the process.
I would think that to people like my father, and the people of his generation, Popeye is like a male priapist. So if you think in ancient terms, he would have a harem, a symbol of male energy.
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Inspirational
Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.Collection: Art
Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.Collection: Dog
My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves.Collection: Health
I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.Collection: Art
I try to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.Collection: Trying
My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.Collection: Inspired
I want my work to be accessible to people.Collection: People
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Money
It's about the production of the work. I need my workers to stay focused.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Optimistic
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.Collection: Art
The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.Collection: Business
Nothing can touch me now - I'm Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !Collection: Art
As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Spiritual
I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.Collection: Sports
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 . . .Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Jelly
I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.Collection: Thinking