The Princeling Of Kitsch

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EXHIBIT: JEFF KOONS

WHERE: SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

WHAT: MIXED-MEDIA SCULPTURES AND WALL PIECES

THE BOTTOM LINE: Koons adds a depressing footnote to Pop art with his self- promoting devotion to gloss and glitz.

The Jeff Koons exhibition on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until next week -- it goes to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in July -- is a fairly grim spectacle. It is, so to speak, a consomme double of cliche: first because the work is more kitschy than kitsch, and second because it has been so often reproduced and discussed by a sensation-hungry and ideology-obsessed art world that its shock value has gone flat. The first time you go into a gallery and see a 7-ft.-high toy bear in a striped T shirt inspecting the whistle of a London cop, all done in painted wood, faithful to the last hair, by some European souvenir manufacturer -- Koons, who probably couldn't carve well enough to do his own initials on a tree, makes none of his stuff himself -- the effect is, well, fairly unsettling. The second time you see it, it's just another Koons. The third time, boredom supervenes.

By now, Koons' work is so overexposed that it loses nothing in reproduction and gains nothing in the original. It is pure stasis. Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol's Rosemary. There is no artist in whom self-advertisement and self-esteem are more ecstatically united than Koons: he makes even Julian Schnabel, who recently proclaimed himself to be the nearest thing America has to Picasso, look like a paragon of self-effacement. He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.

Koons has, however, made a contribution to American culture in the form of comedy: the sight of so many critics, dealers and museum folk peering into the demitasse of his talent and declaring it an oracular well whose contents address issues, as the phrase goes, of class, race, money, sex, obscenity, beauty, power and desire. Art is short, bibliography long. Clearly, we are in Madonnaland, where every publicity hound -- oops, semiotician of mass culture -- must have his day in the museum.

At the start of his career, about 14 years ago, the world was not ready for Koons. He made his first works, inflatable plastic flowers bought in a dime store and set in front of mirrors, without many people noticing. A second group of objects, vacuum cleaners displayed in highly lighted Plexiglas cases, failed at first to excite the indifferent collectors. How could this be? "I've always loved sales," Koons remarks in the catalog, "and to me, being a salesman is being very generous to the public because you're meeting the needs of the people."