Published September 20, 2008 by aanews
All of Annika Ström films from 1995 to 2007 are screened in a small room dvided by a red curtain like an old cinema. The bigger room features a selection of the artist’s text pieces. At the opening, on Saturday the 6th of September Annika hired two young handball players and dressed them in purple suits with golden buttons. The were both holding brackets with sweets and popcorn for sale at regular prices. The sweets were signed by the artist. Later the visitors search for signed packages in garbage bins…
ersailles gave us diamonds, and diamonds are forever. Versailles gave us fashion, and hemlines have never been the same. And today the most touristed site in the world (5.5 million visitors/year!) gives us Jeff Koons. He never looked so good, and probably never will again. He looks even better than Cicciolina flashing her pussy getting out of a limo: vulgar, beautiful, exciting, bright, irresistible as catnip is to cats.Afterart News went en masse, flashing our press cards and finessing the endless lines to get in. It starts in the exterior courtyard, before you find yourself immersed in the odorous river of humanity (overheard: “It’s that New York subway smell!”) that courses through Versailles all day every day: BALLOON FLOWER (green). Standing on a misconceived platform, BALLOON FLOWER (green) is royal eye candy in polished stainless steel, a gem set in the kingdom of kitsch. All dismissive Koons criticism (“What’s he done that Claus Oldenberg didn’t do?”) evaporates from right minds on a glorious fall day in Versailles like dew from the long lawns. Then you really start looking at it. Classical sculptural elements like surface and depth have been pushed to marvelous levels: the “highly sanded” surface both absorbs and reflects the world in its seductive curves. There’s no way into it, there’s no way around it, and there’s no way out. It’s immaculately manufactured, of course. Conceptually BALLOON FLOWER (green) plays a high/low kitsch/classical mind game in perfect pitch. It’s hilarious and majestic. It’s the apotheosis of the banal. And you haven’t even entered the chateau yet.So go, you’ll love it. The only thing missing is Cicciolina in Louis XIV’s bed. But that’s not hard to imagine.As everyone knows, two polemical arguments surround this marriage of ageless in-your-face French pomposity and American kitsch on steroids. The first is best expressed by the grumbling tourists who paid good money to get in and don’t like these pimples of contemporary art on the face and backside of their blue-blooded fantasies. This matter of taste actually works for Koons in a way 10 million tourists would never imagine: it gives the exhibition the de rigeur subversive element it totally lacks and yet needs to succeed. In fact, there is absolutely nothing even mildly subversive here. And yet where would good contemporary art be without a dash of the indecent? 
