Art Wank

Slap down for Koons

As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain.

• Jedediah Wakefield, lawyer, quoted in Cat Weaver, ‘Is a Cease and Desist About Irony, Hypocrisy or Legal Strategy?’, 10 March 2011, Hyperallergic, < http://hyperallergic.com/20398/cease-and-desist-strategy/>.

AW: For context. Jeff Koons’s lawyers (Jones Day) sent a cease-and-desist letter to Park Life, a San Francisco shop and gallery, to try to prevent them from selling balloon dog bookends, claiming that they were too similar to Koons’s sculptures. Jedediah Wakefield, of Fenwick and West, took on Park Life’s case pro bono and Koons’s lawyers soon dropped the case. As Jamie Alexander of Park Life wrote on his blog: ‘isn’t his ENTIRE FUCKING CAREER based on co-opting other peoples’ work????’

Jeff Loon

‘[art] lets you kind of control physiology and the secretions that take place within the body’

Jeff Koons, quoted in Randy Kennedy, ‘The Koons Collection’, The New York Times, 24 February 2010

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/arts/design/28koons.html?pagewanted=1

AW: We’d love to wax lyrical on the rubbish that spews from the mouth of Jeff Koons, but Calvin Tomkins (quoted in the same article cited above) has summed it up best:

‘it is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.’