Jeff Koons Quotes

When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.

A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is ... not about economics at all.

I enjoy all mediums, and I have to say, music is the medium that first made me understand how powerful art could be.

People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down.

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there's an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there's just this sense of expansion. Because that's where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

I think about my work every minute of the day.

My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.

The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It's not about the object, and it's not about the image; it's about the viewer. That's where the art happens.

Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.

I'm really not a person who consumes a lot. I don't have a sports car.

I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I'm a messenger.

Pretty mundane closet, but a lot of ties. And I tend not to throw anything out, so I have a lot of clothes from all times from my life. I can be a little sentimental with things like that.

When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.

As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.

I always liked Disney films. To this day I think 'Bambi' is great.

I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.

The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we're left with the opportunity to focus on our work.

Nothing can touch me now - I'm Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !

I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.

I want my work to be accessible to people,

From the time that I was a child, I loved interacting with people. I would go around door-to-door and sell candies and gift-wrapping paper, and it was a great way to interact with people and communicate with people.

I believe in sensuality. I believe in sex. I believe in the survival of the species. I like aspects of things that are ethereal, but I like the reality of nature and embracing the way nature works, and aspects of interrelationships between male-female, aspects of the body, the way the body has changed over thousands of years ...

I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

I like my drawings to be direct. I don't generally work on them for too long, but that doesn't mean that they are not works in their own right.

I'm in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they'd be if I'd have done them myself.

The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.

If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.

Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you've given up control.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.

The entertainment industry, the advertising industry have taken [the] tools from the art world and made themselves much more politically potent. We are really devastated and very impotent right now. A photographer just working for an advertising company has a platform to be much more politically effective in the world than an artist.

I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.

I think artists are always investigating how to have an economic, political platform. At one time, artists were supported by the Church. Then they were supported also by the state.

I learned a lot about the images of pornography and how much they dealt with close-up, when a person is at their most vulnerable and having to reveal details about themselves. I wanted to combine the eternal in two different manners. There is the biological eternal - here is our species reproducing - and then the transparent, spiritual aspect of it.

The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.

Art helped give me confidence.

I produce a lot of my artwork in Germany.

I'd have to say I've become more aware of my communal responsibility.