DON'T CALL ME KITSCH!

Meet JeffKoons, the world’s most expensive living artist but is the Balloon Dog creator the heir to Andy Warhol or a cynical self-publicist making trophy art for billionaires?

AS JEFF Koons slowly makes his way across an elegant Florentine square, photographers surround him like a flock of hungry seagulls. It’s the launch of his first big retrospective in Italy and he’s getting the kind of attention normally reserved for a Hollywood film star.

Jeff(66) is one of a handful of celebrities in the world of visual art whose name pulls crowds to museums. He’s also one of its most divisive figures, whose sculptures sell to the super-rich for tens of millions of dollars.

Over the past 25 years the growing number of high-net-worth individuals has led to an explosion in the contemporary art market. According to Artprice. com, the contemporary art price index soared to an all-time high at the beginning of summer 2021 – with price increases of 400% since the early 2000s.

In the past year alone, $2,7 billion (R41,8bn) worth of contemporary works have changed hands at auction. About a third of these sales are generated by a handful of artists: Jeff is one of them, Banksy is another.

In 2019 Jeff became the highest-selling living artist when his stainless-steel Rabbit, modelled on a child’s inflatable bunny, sold for more than $91 million (R1,2bn) to a billionaire hedge fund manager.

Slim with a well-coiffed head of dark hair, Jeff is dressed in a navy shirt and a well-pressed pair of jeans. He looks more like a Wall Street banker than a tortured, paint-splattered creative – perhaps because he once was. He spent six years as a commodities trader before taking up art full-time.

Today, his work divides the art world between those who think he’s a cynical salesman creating big, shiny, superficial trophies and those who see him as a great figure in the American pop art tradition, the heir to Andy Warhol.