«ART IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH»

From recreating part of Damien Hirst's 2008 Sotheby's auction, to reassembling Jeff Koons's explicit works featuring the artist in porn-inspired clinches with his former wife, La Cicciolina, the show takes as its starting point Warhol's adage that "good business is the best art". If Hirst's auction is described by Pop Life's co-curator, Jack Bankowsky, as "a work of total theatre", others may see it as having been nakedly commercial. After all, it broke records for a single-artist auction, raising £111m. But Koons denied the work in the exhibition, which also includes toys mass-produced by the Japanese artist Takahashi Murakami and a piece by Keith Haring, right, was simply about making money."I don't think that's what artists think about," he said. "Making a living is part of life, but you become involved in art because of the power of art. Artists have always acquired economic and political power. At one time it came from the church, and then from monarchs. For the precursors to the kind of work you see [in the exhibition] you have to go back to [the 19th-century artist] Courbet, one of the first who struggled for art to survive on its own terms and break free of those old hierarchies."

The Guardian
Sept 29 2009