Jeff Koons quote

note: For background information on this post, read this.

Art Rogers
Photograph:
Puppies
1980


Jeff Koons
Wood painted sculpture:
String of Puppies
1998

I liked this quote by Jeff Koons that I read in "Inside the Art World: Conversations with Barbaralee Diamonstein" regarding his popular work Puppy:

BLDS: Why don't you think it is a case of plagiarism, when you have the two images side by side?

JK: Okay. First of all, I believe in an objectiverealm, and I was educated by the work of Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein. I was brought up in this culture, and I respond in this culture. I have never, in any manner, plagiarized anybody. I have created a vocabulary and created a body of work, Banality, that was absolutely influential and radical in the culture that I participate in. To me, the postcard was a ready-made. The postcad itself and my String of Puppies (1988) are 2 totally different things, totally different. One is a photograph, that is only 2-dimensional—mine is 3-dimensional. This postcard is probably about three by five inches, mine's bigger than life, and it's in wood, a spiritual material—carved by people who carve the saints. I combine some postcard of some old woman that I found with a daisy in her hand, and daisies in her hair, and I put daisies there.I animated the dogs to some Italian blue dog in a cartoon strip and made the puppies all blue, with brown noses. I painted it with Buddha type of colors, orange and blues and greens. I made a parody of Seward A. Johnson, benches, and George Segal—this type of public thing. To me, I was using something as though it were a letter in an alphabet. And if artists cannot use things that are already here, this means that I cannot function in an objective realm, that I must be a masturbator, that I have to deal with the self, and I can't deal in things beyond the self, that I can't create in the objective realms, I can't create in the realms of association and create my vocabulary there. That means I cannot make any form of visual protest, that I am censored against visual images."