Jackson Was ‘Contemporary Christ Figure,’ Says Koons: Interview

Jeff Koons has turned London’s Serpentine Gallery into a menagerie.

The 54-year-old artist shows inflatable lobsters, turtles and dolphins (made of polychromed aluminum) in his first exhibition at a U.K. public gallery, “Jeff Koons: Popeye Series” (which starts tomorrow and runs through Sept. 13).

Absent from this children’s kingdom is his 1988 white-and- gold ceramic sculpture “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” which portrays the smiling superstar with an arm around his pet chimpanzee. Jackson died June 25 after suffering cardiac arrest at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air.

“I wanted to show Michael as a contemporary Christ figure: I wanted to give the viewer a sense of a spiritual authority,” says the soft-spoken Koons, wearing a gray summer suit and a serious expression in an interview at the gallery.

Koons intended the sculpture as a way of “paying homage to the greatness,” he says. He had watched Jackson moonwalk, and “everybody’s jaw just dropped, seeing that.”

“The type of adulation, the type of support that’s given to pop artists—this was the contemporary type of support that I thought that Christ would have received in his time,” explains Koons, who says he executed the sculpture in a Renaissance style, its triangular shape reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “Pieta.”

Koons became the world’s most expensive living artist in November 2007 when his sculpture “Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)” (1994-2006) fetched $23.6 million at auction in New York. He has been overtaken since by Lucian Freud. Read Article

By Farah Nayeri