In its latest exhibition, Oxford’s Ashmolean, one of the world’s oldest public museums, seeks to present the US artist Jeff Koons in a dialogue with its collection of artefacts from antiquity to the present day. The aim is “to provoke a conversation between his creations and the history of art and ideas which his work engages”. 
The cover of the exhibition catalogue says Koons is “described as the most famous, important, subversive, controversial and expensive artist in the world”. He is presented as working with two distinct conceptions of the creation of the artistic object: the “readymade” and the appropriated object, the former “using unadulterated found objects” and the latter “using painstaking replicas of ancient sculptures and old master paintings which almost defy belief in their craftsmanship and precision”.
The three rooms of the museum’s special exhibition (until 9 June) space have been prepared by Koons himself along with the guest curator Norman Rosenthal. The first room, which opens with a short film of a discussion between Koons and the Ashmolean’s director, Xa Sturgis, presents a selection of key works from his early career and his Equilibrium, Statuary and Banality series. 
The second room displays works from his Antiquity series as well as a Balloon Venus and two Ballerinas. The third room is devoted to his Gazing Ball series, in which the artist presents repainted versions of masterpieces with a shiny blue sphere placed in front of each. 
The works are well displayed throughout and the label texts provide extensive information on the technical challenges involved in creating the art, and on what stimulated their creation and how Koons intends them to be seen. The film is also instructive, offering Koons the opportunity to give a summary of his views on the therapeutic function of his art and the challenges he offers viewers.
Deflated context
However, the exhibition gives little or no sense of the debates around Koons’s work. Having described him as subversive and controversial, the curators could have greatly improved the visitor experience if they had explained in what ways specific works provoked controversy and what conventions they were supposed to be subverting. 
There is also little information on Koons’s background, which is an omission for an artist who presents his sensibility as having been formed in his earliest years and his practice as essentially concerned with preserving his childhood sense of wonder. 
And, perhaps most importantly, the exhibition gives no real perspective on his artistic development. Although he is an artist who disavows all critical perspectives, wants to do away with judgment and is only interested in the effect his work has on the viewer, Koons can be inspired and inspiring. 
Nevertheless, I found his latest work, exemplified in the Gazing Ball series, precious and repetitive. It seems to reflect a vainglorious desire to see himself as part of the canon of great European art and sits awkwardly with his own concept of creation as an art of active play that transcends all values. Moreover, the labels for this series offer no clear understanding of why Koons chose to reproduce these specific artworks and how we are to interact with them. 
More fundamentally, no attempt is made to explain what Koons represents and why he creates outrage. It is impossible to remain indifferent to his work or appreciate him without an understanding of what is involved in his almost universal rejection by art critics. 
Fountain of knowledge
As the introduction to the catalogue reminds us, Koons drew much of his inspiration from the French artist Marcel Duchamp and particularly his readymades. 
In taking an object of mass production and presenting it as a work of art, a sublime transformation can take place in the mind of the viewer without the artist making anything at all. Duchamp drew the conclusion that the museum was superfluous, trapping visitors in taste and convention, and that art was at a dead end. 
And this is where I think Koons has something important to say. He believes the essential response to art (and to reality in general) is not one of judgment or critical evaluation. It is even less a matter of learning to appreciate objects of culture. 
He wants to offer himself as a liberating model to modern consumers of art, encouraging us to choose magic objects for our private use and pleasure: to create our own cabinet of curiosities, selecting personal merchandise and commodities for their power to act on us and make us act – the intimate museum that each one of us carries in ourselves.
Koons aspires to regain the seriousness that he had as a child at play – a child sees objects independently of all questions of value and taste. This is why he rightly rejects the accusation that his art is kitsch, for kitsch implies an ironic perspective totally alien to childhood. 
And I suspect this is why Koons chose to work with the Ashmolean, because of its origins in the cabinet of curiosities, the collection of readymades of natural history and manmade wonders amassed by the Tradescants. 
The great failure of this exhibition is that instead of presenting Koons’s work in relation to this tradition, showing him as a collector of unique and extraordinary objects who seeks to stimulate curiosity and wonder in the viewer, the Ashmolean and Rosenthal chose to present the artist as a new master in the pantheon of artists. 
Paradoxically, the most playful and successful part of the exhibition is the shop. It gives you a sense of what the exhibition might have been: an enchanted space where we don’t evaluate the world but interact directly with it.
Jonah Ungar is a volunteer at Modern Art Oxford
Project data
  • Cost £776,627 
  • Main funders Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins; Larry Gagosian; Friends of the Ashmolean; Andrew W Mellon Foundation via Ashmolean University Engagement Programme; Jeff Koons studio
  • Exhibition design Ashmolean; Jeff Koons studio
  • Graphics The Creative Key; Ashmolean
  • Film Marina Zarya; ATH Film
  • Lighting Lux Lucis
  • Art installation Arnold AG
  • Structural engineer Price & Myers 
  • Transport Momart
  • Admission Adult £12.25; concession £11.25; child £6