Sam Codrington
Jim Bean
Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Train was made in 1986 and formed part of Koons's second one-man exhibition, Luxury and Degradation, held at the International with Monument Gallery in New York. As the show's title implies, Koons's train is at once a celebration and a caveat, pointing to the exploitation that lay behind the successes of the speculators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alike, be it through land sales, booze or advertising, while commemorating the heroic spirit of these frontiersmen and trailblazers. Like Andy Warhol, Koons has taken an iconic element from the cultural landscape of the United States and used it as a vehicle for a sophisticated investigation of art and society. As he explained, "I wanted to suggest how the idea of luxury, through abstraction, is used to induce a psychological state of degradation, the public is constantly undergoing a re-education, being set up for the big kill"
Jim Bean
Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Train was made in 1986 and formed part of Koons's second one-man exhibition, Luxury and Degradation, held at the International with Monument Gallery in New York. As the show's title implies, Koons's train is at once a celebration and a caveat, pointing to the exploitation that lay behind the successes of the speculators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alike, be it through land sales, booze or advertising, while commemorating the heroic spirit of these frontiersmen and trailblazers. Like Andy Warhol, Koons has taken an iconic element from the cultural landscape of the United States and used it as a vehicle for a sophisticated investigation of art and society. As he explained, "I wanted to suggest how the idea of luxury, through abstraction, is used to induce a psychological state of degradation, the public is constantly undergoing a re-education, being set up for the big kill"