What’s the trouble? Well, all this white stuff on my sleeve, is LSD…
Mr. Koons has collected since the beginning of his life as a professional artist, even before he could afford to pay for work. (…)
By the late 1980s, as his star and his bank balance rose precipitously, he began to collect high-end work by artists he loved, like Lichtenstein, but he was forced to sell a lot of it during an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with his first wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller. (…)
But as his fortunes roared back in recent years, he began pouring a significant amount of his wealth into building a collection, joining high-profile contemporary artists like Damien Hirst and John Currin in concentrating heavily on old masters and 19th-century works. (…)
Even by the standards of the art world, where language about art strays easily into deep and enigmatic waters, Mr. Koons’s way of explaining his own work is hard to take seriously, though he has always seemed to take it that way. (…) In a profile of Mr. Koons in The New Yorker in 2007 Calvin Tomkins observed that “it is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.”
