May 14, 2007

Koons Redux

The artist Jeff Koons is back in style. There's a great article about his up-and-down career in the recent New Yorker magazine. Koons is the guy whose art works have included everything from a basketball floating in a clear container of water to an enormous abstract rabbit cast in shiny metal. Somehow Koons is able to take imagery we see every day and present it in a way that puts a smile on our face, seems (at first) unabashedly kitch, and then takes on a presence that is irresistable.

Explaining one of his works, he said, "What I wanted was to help people accept their own cultural background." In the New Yorker piece, Calvin Tompkins writes, "Marcel Duchamp, too, believed that the viewer was an essential part of the creative process. The artist initiated the creative act, he said, but it was up to the viewer to complete it, by interpreting its meaning and its place in art history."

It is no wonder, then, that in this interactive world of consumer choice and participation, Jeff Koons - who emulates Duchamp in so many ways - would become popular once again. In many ways, his genius is like the genius of great marketers: identify something that resonates with broad numbers of people...reinterpret it and re-present it, taking it to a new and different place while keeping "one foot" planted still in the culture from which the new has evolved.

No Room in the Inn?

As rich media grows on the Internet, web pages are becoming more crowded and plentiful. After all, it takes more pages to present more videos. Inevitably, these rich media videos are preceded by a commercial that is short and unavoidable. (The click forward function miraculously becomes 'frozen' when they appear.)

I'm waiting to see the extent to which sites exercise restraint on the number of ads they show, as well as the number of pages they make us scroll through in order to retrieve what could be much more succinctly presented.