JEFF KOONS GOES TO THE MOON

WHEN I ENTERED his crowded studio, I recognized him right away. Jeff Koons today looks practically identical to how he did in photos from his first solo show in 1980, when he asked us to accept a fresh-out-of-the-box vacuum cleaner as art.

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In language Koons might use to describe himself, he has nice hair, nice eyes, and a nice smile—which he deploys at the end of most sentences when any old punctuation would do. As perhaps he intended, it’s also hard to look at Koons without fl ashing on the works he made a decade later with his then wife , I lona Staller, a porn actress and member of the Italian parliament. In the series, Made in Heaven, Koons photographed himself and Staller in flagrante, dick and balls and all. The art world nearly excommunicated him. He and Staller divorced and she took their kid back to Italy and he had to destroy some of the works in order to make a case for custody. Anyway, he still looks like that guy.

“We’ve never met in the past?” he said, squeezing my hand and fl ashing his goofy grin. “You have a familiarity.…”

His hands were as soft as a cherub’s. And I found myself smiling the way one does when one is seen. We hadn’t met before. But like any magnetic force, he beckoned me in, then began washing over me with explanations of what I’d be encountering in the many thousands of square feet we might explore. As he led me through the studio, we found the detritus of the world he’d rendered during his 45-year career. Filing cabinets filled with little dime-store figurines that he’d scanned and blown up to enormous scale, to the sculptural proportions of the marble masterpieces in the museums of Europe. Blue gazing balls and stainless-steel rabbits. The fl oral phantasmagoria of puppies and “split-rockers”. It was like being backstage with all the props and set dressings for an interminable musical—