Koons' interlocutors in Rem Koolhaas's semi-inflated pavilion in front of the Serpentine Gallery were Koolhaas himself and the gallery's co-curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist. The two European intellectuals took it in turns to try to penetrate beyond his very American resolve to be "really friendly, and really positive and optimistic." The American pop artists were not much interested in ideas. Pop art was about "liking things," as Warhol once said. Koons, who says his art is "about aspects of entertainment" and believes that "salespeople are on the front line of culture," is the true inheritor of that tradition. "You know, Hans Ulrich," he would begin, smiling sweetly, gently refusing a question on the Baudrillardian reading of the commodity-as-sign. Or: "Well, Rem, the answer to that is quite simple: the money didn't come." I was repeatedly reminded of something he once told Sylvester: "My painting is really, for me, about my background. I was trying to show that I come from a provincial background. Eventually, over a period of time, the provincial always wins."
Koons' father had a furniture showroom, which one day would be a living room, and a week later a kitchen. "The fact that Jeff grew up around commercialism and marketing, and the fact that a kitchen wasn't really a kitchen — wasn't really anything — resonates with the hollowness we have today," his friend Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci, has said.
Koons has remarried. He spends time with his wife and their three children on the farm that used to belong to his grandfather in the countryside close to where he grew up in Pennsylvania. John Updike's family farm, the setting for many of his novels, is also in Pennsylvania, at Shillington. Is Koons' farm anywhere nearby? This draws a blank. "I don't read books," Koons says. "I only see magazines and newspapers. Images. The flood of images. I enjoy narrative through the visual. The great thing about art is that it brings all the disciplines of the world together — literature, philosophy, psychology, science. But, you know, I only really like to be in the studio with the people I regard as my extended family, my assistants. You try very much to be in the moment, looking at everything in the world all the time, putting it into play."
Dennis Potter wrote for television, the great indiscriminate disseminator of the visual, so I try a Potter quote on him: "Capitalism now is about selling all of you to all of you. But they don't know what it is they're selling. The only object is to keep in the game. Which is to keep selling something. And one day we're going to find out what it is."
"I'm not interested in capitalism at all," says Koons. "I'm not interested in objects ... I'm interested in people."
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