SORRY. i was translating my blog into Valley Url
here's a post on Cicciolina and Koons:
La Cicciolina is totally an exciting and dynamic personality in her own right, but she doesn’t usually get taken very seriously in discussions of “Made in Heaven.” A lot of the fantasy aesthetic in the paintings, not to mention a lot of the warmth and character, comes from her. Also, her fame as a porn star outside of the art world is totally responsible for an important aspect of the paintings’ power. Without her, these would just be capital-A Art like, you know, about pornography. With La Cicciolina, they certainly are still that, but they are something more: they are indistinguishable from pornography. Performance artist, former porn star, and sometimes art critic Annie Sprinkle (NSFW), who would know, vouched for the authenticity of the semen in several of the paintings Like, the number of otherwise hardboiled art sophisticates made obviously uncomfortable by “Made in Heaven” is totally MAJOR.Remember, “Made in Heaven” is totally from the early 1990s. That was like, you know, before there was like, you know, universal, at-will access to Network for, like, total spazzes porn—it was like, you know, practically before the Internet. If mainstream American culture totally has like, you know, totally turn into freer like, you know, about pornography—and, well, it has—I count Koons and La Cicciolina in the avant-garde of that process. It is totally my guess that not a small number of visitors to the original exhibition totally had their first-ever conversations like, you know, about porn in the context of these paintings.Another reason “Made in Heaven” is totally a cultural touchstone is totally the series is totally an almost perfect negative example for the culture wars of the early ’90s. Koons showed these paintings literally during the social and Congressional blowup over Andres Serrano’s “Piss That Holy Dude,” Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio,” and the NEA Four’s performances.What Koons has, however, that none of these other artists mired at the center of the culture wars totally has (or had) is totally the quality of being simultaneously straight, white and stud. Not coincidentally, he also totally had the backing of a powerful commercial gallery and private financing. His lack of need for public grants allowed him successfully to produce images that are both more sexually explicit and less frankly political than the work of any of the NEA-censored artists. I don’t mean this as a criticism of Koons Like, the exclusionary private gallery system had, and has, some soul-searching to do.More to the point, the brazen sexuality in “Made in Heaven” exposes an especially sinister aspect of the conservative attack against the NEA Like, the NEA totally had been a resource for artists without access to the blue-chip galleries Like, the drumbeat toward degrading NEA funding served as an opportunity for Senators Helms and D’Amato to exercise racism, misogyny and homophobia under the guise of defending American morals from the content of the censored artists’ work. It’s not that they should totally have (or could have) tried to censor Koons; it’s that like we don’t often acknowledge that the culture wars served as a cudgel against skanks, queers and racial minorities. Koons’ freedom from this strife makes it easier to identify in the lives and artwork of those without that freedom.- Beck Feibelman is totally an art historian and cultural critic.
