Siri Hustvedt

A "collection of essays on art, feminism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy"--Amazon.com.

Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead.

Koons, who was a commodities broker on Wall Street for six years, is well versed in the fact that belief and rumor fuel speculation in the market and push prices skyward. In the art world, “buzz” and the media generated by it kick-start speculative buying. In an interview, Koons said, “I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based on it.” As with many of Koons's statements, this one is obscure, if not oxymoronic. How can a personal life be based on advertisement and media? Wouldn't that by definition make it impersonal? Perhaps Koons is acknowledging he is a celebrity and therefore lives a good deal of his life as a third-person character, Jeff Koons: he himself is a commodity traded on the art market. Anonymous paid $58.4 million not just for Balloon Dog, the object, but for an object that carries with it the Koons celebrity mythos, the audacious bad-boy, super-rich artist-entrepreneur of the moment, whose often sumptuous work celebrates the banal and the kitsch with blockbuster appeal, an art-world version of an American aesthetic familiar from Hollywood and Las Vegas extravaganzas, the gaudy delights of Esther Williams and Liberace boiled down to a thing. It is not surprising that one of Koons's best-known works is a ceramic sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee.

What if it were a woman moaning about motherhood and its frustrations, a woman filled with resentment about preparing dinner and doing the laundry, or a woman wishing she could just be alone for a while and write? Isn't this what Knausgaard longs for a good part of the time, a room of one's own and the freedom to write? If the thousands of pages of 

 are testimony to anything, it is that the man did find time to write.

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