«I JUST READ EVERYTHING»

-Pretend Jeff Koons is an artist. Not a happy hotshot in a suit, serving as crystal meth to big-game-­buying megacollectors and auction ­houses. Pretend he’s not a self-styled weird Mitt Romney–like family man, a hollowed-out Howdy Doody. Imagine that he isn’t so easy to bash that even comatose critics like John Yau lose it when they see his art, trashing Koons’s flowered Puppy and then admitting to never having seen it. (Yau once beat me up in print for liking it, too.) Finally, pretend that Koons’s concurrent gigantic shows—one at the Battlestar Gagosian on West 24th Street, the other in the West 19th Street branches of the David Zwirner empire—were in less turbocharged environments, and that they constituted any other double show by a 58-year-old artist. One who’s made some of the most vexingly paradoxical sculpture of the past 30 years, work that makes you squirm even as it forces you to grapple with its mysteries. You’d come out thinking—or at least, I came out thinking—there’s still something there.

Jerry Saltz