Jeff Koons Quotations

I think about my work every minute of the day.

When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.

Even in making objects, as soon as you start to get the feeling that some form of craft is coming into place, you realize that everything is wrong. Because craft is really just a fetish. It is wasted energy. It's about the object, some space which has nothing to do with the human.

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 believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.

I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.

I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times... that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us.

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've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.

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.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

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.

I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

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 went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.

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 don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

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.

From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

I'm always trying to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so that they feel open participation.

I think it would be great, ... Greenacres is one of the best cities in dealing with kids.

I think artists are always investigating how to have an economic, political platform. At one time, artists were supported by the Church. Then they were supported also by the state.

I think we have a ... fundamental problem. We need to be much more aggressive.

We haven't even broken ground yet, and we're ready to sell, ... I'm concerned about the water resources.

We waited too long to resolve this, ... Negotiations went sideways, and then up and down.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.

This thing got jammed down our throats, ... To me it just didn't make any sense. Even to this day, we're trying to think about how we're going to build roads out there.

I've also told Greenacres that I'll have other money available for the city next year,

The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.

If you've got the business community coming in and asking for a dramatic tax cut, one of the first things on the chopping block is going to be the development board, ... There's some tension there.

I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.

It's always wonderful to come to an event. I know how in my life art has come in and really changed it, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art.

I remember being an art student and going to the Whitney in 1974 to see the exhibition of Jim Nutt, the Chicago imagist. It was then I transferred to school in Chicago, all because of that show.

A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

I told Mr. Weisman that this was getting embarrassing, ... It's the first time that I've ever gone to him and used the word 'please.'

When I view the world, I don't think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.

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.

Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.

My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.

My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves.

A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

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.

As an artist, I've always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.

Art was something I could do better. It gave me a sense of self.

I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.

I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.

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.

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 want my work to be accessible to people,

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.

It's about the production of the work. I need my workers to stay focused.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.

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.

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.

Art helped give me confidence.

I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.

As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.

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.

If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.

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.

Nothing can touch me now - I'm Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !

I'm interested in power.

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'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.

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.

My favorite activity is to be with my family.

I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.

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 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.

I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.

I try to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.

I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.

Ive always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. Thats what Ive always done.

The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.

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.