Jeff Koons Must Die -the game, of course! (this is a little graphic.)

So I was just browsing the internet like any college student with no immediate plans to do actual work and I came across a fabulous video/ game called "Jeff Koons Must Die." Now, normally hearing a title like that with any other name would shock me and set me immediately in the distasteful direction but because the clever designer feels the same way about Jeff Koons as me I could not leave it be.

Jeff Koons is an innovative man, he has ingenious ways of creating art. He is most famous for his Rabbit piece, a sculpture constructed out of cast aluminum but molded in a way that makes it look like it is actually a nearly weightless silver blown up balloon rabbit. He further cultivated that style and made an entire series using this technique with inflatable-seeming heavy metal pieces. The sculptures fool your perception as a viewer, often causing your mind to ignore the impossibility of the physics involved in a plastic blown up toy being used in such a manner. This is the creative method artistry that I appreciate in Jeff Koons's work.

HOWEVER, Jeff Koons is perhaps one of the most egotistical artists alive. His work has been dismissed as kitsch: crass and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings in his works, and to be honest anyone can tell that his art is very superficial especially after he married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian pornography star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller). His Made in Heaven series of paintings, photographs, and sculptures portrayed the couple in explicit sexual positions and created quite the hubbub.

When I was living in London, I saw his Made in Heaven exhibit in the Tate Modern. The gallery room it was in was quite small, and it is important to mention that the photography pieces are quite large, approximately 8 feet x 12 feet. So imagine walking into a small room with a dozen extra large photographs taller and wider than you from Playboy splashing the walls and glass sculptures of people having sex on plynths throughout the room. Let me just say it was incredibly unpleasant being there and not in an artistic grotesquely handsome sort of way. I find his work crass, and jarring in the way seeing a PG snuff film would be.

If it makes you feel any better (it surely made me laugh to myself a bit) his face and his erect penis are never visible simultaneously in any of the photographs. I believe he had a body double. Hah!

Anyway, after all that... here's the videogame that I found which inspired me to write about Jeff Koons and his horrendous artwork: