Interview

DC: How do you define kitsch?

JK: I don't feel close to it. I think that kitsch is a judgment and it's using language-using the ability to classify something and to make things kind of unworthy of a certain level.

DC: I was surprised actually to see you described in ARTnews as the king of kitsch.

JK: That's a misunderstanding. Sometimes the messenger gets confused with the message.

DC: You are finally showing the "Celebration" works in Berlin together?

JK: It's an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Mies van der Rohe building, with 11 "Celebration" sculptures.

DC: I always preferred the word celebration over acceptance, because it's never enough to just accept something-to me it implies defeat. Whereas celebrating something really, in some perverse way, puts more of the power in your hands. Like you're taking something slightly deflated and pumping it full of air and putting it back on a pedestal.

JK: "Celebration" involved my son Ludwig back in the early '90s and the situation of him being taken away, and I used my art to hang on to my belief in humanity in a way. Because we had a sense of a lot of injustice during that time.

DC: Do you see your son at all?

JK: I can't really see Ludwig, but I'm sure someday I will. I do have four really wonderful boys at home right now. And I have a wonderful daughter, Shannon. I'm sure at some point my situation with Ludwig will turn around.

DC: Do you collect art?

JK: I collect a wide range of things: old masters; I love French 19th-century work; I have some antiquities. But it's an ongoing process. I have some contemporary works-I have a great Picasso-The Kiss. It's a really fantastic painting.

DC: I can see that it's very Koonsian, but what do you like about it?

JK: How profound it is. You look at it and see that Picasso is thinking about Titian, and at the same time there's this sense of sexual conquest through thinking about Titian, and in a certain way there's this sense of movement almost to Alexander the Great. But then it also makes reference to Donatello's Madonna and Child.

DC: What about the art market? I mean, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith recently wrote something interesting, saying that Damien Hirst uses the art market the way you use popular culture. Do you feel engaged with the way that people invest meaning in art the same way they invest money in it? You're an astute businessman but then sort of famously not, as well. [laughs]

JK: You know, 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. 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.

DC: To what extent has having kids amplified or affected this feeling?

JK: 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.

DC: Okay. So what is it about an inflatable pool toy that you love so much?

JK: That even though it's printed on its side that it is not a life-saving device, actually it is. I do see it as life-saving. Do you think we're almost done?

DC: Almost. I want to ask about impressionism.

JK: I love Manet.

DC: You do? What do you love about him?

JK: I love how he doesn't have anger. He's very ambitious and political, but you really don't get a sense of anger. And there's a sense of human warmth in Manet's work. It's very, very direct.

DC: But there's a sense in Manet of the celebration of the female body, which is something you have a good appreciation of yourself.

JK: 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 . . . most of the morning I was looking at the Venus of Willendorf.

DC: Okay.

JK: This is a swan. [Koons holds up a small balloon-swan form] This swan is very totemic, very phallic. But if you look at the side view of the swan, it's all a very sexual harmony and then the inside's totally feminine and vaginal-and so it functions. Beauty is really sexualized. For me it was an epiphany, looking at this on the computer, two-dimensionally. I enjoy things that have a lot of layers to them and are connected. Anything that is connecting and that has a lot of different layers I become curious then . . .

DC: It's funny because a lot of people would look at your work and think there aren't layers.

JK: Did we speak enough about Versailles?

DC: Do you have anything else to say about Louis XIV?

JK: I was intrigued about its being a place where everything has been thought about aesthetically. Louis XIV and Louis XV, XVI, Marie-Antoinette-they lived in a world that was so fantastic. They could go to bed and their gardens would be blue. And all night long the gardeners would pick up these flower pots and put in new flowers. And they would wake up and the whole garden would be red. An amazing fantasy.

DC: Not a bad way to live. What do you live like?

JK: [laughs] I really live for my work here at the studio, so I'm not very extravagant in consumption or anything like that. I love to collect art so my extravagance is to try to collect beautiful things. But you know, I live on the Upper East Side and I have my studio down here on the West Side. And we have our weekend place in Pennsylvania because we wanted our children to be able to have an experience that's different than just the New York Upper East Side experience. So I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.