PERSON
Jeff Koons
American artist (b. 1955) whose mirror-polished sculptures — commanding record prices while denying any evidence of the artist's hand — provide Groys with the paradigmatic figure of the AI moment's logic: the artist as director, the work as commodity, the surface as everything.
Jeff Koons is the American artist whose career most thoroughly realized the logic Groys identifies in contemporary cultural production. Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, Koons trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before relocating to New York, where he worked briefly as a commodities broker on Wall Street before committing full-time to his art practice in the mid-1980s. His work — from the basketball tanks of the Equilibrium series through the porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles to the mirror-polished Celebration sculptures that include the Balloon Dog — has consistently commanded the highest prices for any living artist while provoking critical dismissal and popular fascination in roughly equal measure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Koons's significance for Groys's framework lies in the precision with which his practice externalized the institutional logic of cultural production. Koons does not physically produce his own work. His studio employs teams