Jeff Koons Un Homme De Confiance

Jeff Koons is widely regarded as one of the most influential, popular and disputed artists of the last 30 years. Koons transforms mass-produced, everyday objects into the highest art forms.

Jeff Koons is undoubtedly the most famously controversial artist today. Whereas American public institutions and art collectors have long ago established him as Warhol's successor, many Europeans still consider him only as an opportunist and an attention seeker. With his combination of the great entrepreneur's positive thinking, the freedom of Pop Art and perfectionism comparable to the masters of the past, Jeff Koons has undeniably succeeded in promoting the strategies of avant garde to the public. This film shows how he has reinvented his role as an artist into a media personality and the status his works enjoy with a number of collectors who have allowed him to fulfil his dreams. Through his art, his own words and those of friends, this world of seduction and reflection also reveals glimpses of a darker and a gloomier side.

The film is shot inside a prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of its single tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons's work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women - including Araya herself - all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. A figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids.