Koons in one gulp

He might be pushing 60 but artist Jeff Koons apparently has no intention of retiring. He’s reaping in the cash as well with his sculpture of an
 inflatable dolphin selling for a cool US$5 million (Bt160 million) last week at Art Basel in Switzerland. Last year, he became the most expensive living artist, too, when his “Balloon Dog (Orange)” sold for $58.4 million at auction.
This week Koons is in New York for the opening of retrospective, which runs from tomorrow through October 19 at the Whitney Museum.
On display are almost 150 works dating from 1978 to the present, with the aluminum-cast 10-foot-high “Play-Doh” and a re-creation of the Liberty Bell among several new works completed just days before the show’s opening.
“This exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvres,” reads the official museum statement.
This exhibition is the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District next year.
Koons, is widely regarded as one of the most influential and controversial artists of the postwar era.
Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market. Yet despite these achievements, Koons has never been the subject of a retrospective surveying the full scope of his career.
By reconstituting all of his most iconic works and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective will allow visitors to understand Koons’ remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted
 whole.
The exhibition will then travel to the Centre Pompidou in
 Paris and to the Guggenheim Bilbao.