Ah, I’ve been wanting to bring back this little Rant of the Week column for awhile now, but have been stymied by either a) lack of good material or b) lack of time to scour the internet in search of good material. But today’s rant is a two-fer, or a three-fer, or something…anyway it’s good, it’s still sorta fresh, and although it’s easy enough to find on your own via the art twit- and blogosphere I present the following, for those of you who are not already aware of the Jerry Saltz vs. John Yau smackdown.

Here’s some quick background: Last December Jerry Saltz wrote a column in New York magazine praising Jeff Koons’ Puppy as the art work of the aughts–or the naughts–or the whatevers!– and Koons himself as “the emblematic artist of the decade—its thumping, thumping heart.” Saltz goes on to argue that

All of Koons’s best art—the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century’s signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory—has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy. Puppy adds to that: It is a virtual history of art, recalling the mottled surfaces of Delacroix (albeit on ’shrooms), the fantastical fairy-tale beings of Redon, a mutant Frankenstein canine from Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, and the eye-buzzing Ben-Day dots of Roy Lichtenstein. As it emits the swirling amorphousness of Tiepolo and the pathos of Watteau, it is also a magnified, misshapen abstraction of Duchamp’s urinal—a similarly deliberate gesture of antic outlandishness, and one that, of course, was signed “R. Mutt.”

Koons’s work has always stood apart for its one-at-a-time perfection, epic theatricality, a corrupted, almost sick drive for purification, and an obsession with traditional artistic values. His work embodies our time and our America: It’s big, bright, shiny, colorful, crowd-pleasing, heat-seeking, impeccably produced, polished, popular, expensive, and extroverted—while also being abrasive, creepily sexualized, fussy, twisted, and, let’s face it, ditzy. He doesn’t go in for the savvy art-about-art gestures that occupy so many current artists. And his work retains the essential ingredient that, to my mind, is necessary to all great art: strangeness.”

And so on. A few weeks later, critic John Yau responds to Saltz’s piece with an essay of his own in The Brooklyn Rail (where Yau serves as art editor), titled “The Difference Between Jerry Saltz’s America and Mine.“  Yau starts out with a reference to a bit by the late comedian Bill Hicks, one in which Hicks rips on Jay Leno for shilling Doritos, despite the gazillions of dollars Leno already has; the implied question being how much more cash does this bloated gazillionaire need that he has to sell us junk food, too? Yau says, of Hicks,

He believed that there are some things that you just shouldn’t do, and one of them was to be a spokesperson for bad or unhealthy products. I was reminded of Hicks’s routine when I read Jerry Saltz’s paean to Jeff Koons’s Puppy, which ‘assumed the form of a West Highland white terrier constructed of stainless steel and 23 tons of soil, swathed in more than 70,000 flowers that were kept alive by an internal irrigation system.’”

Jeff Koons installation in CAT Scan room of Advocate Children's Hospital. New York Times.

As part of a new initiative to bring contemporary art into hospitals and other health care facilities around the country, RxArt, a New York nonprofit group headed by Diane Brown, will install several pieces by Jeff Koons in the CAT Scan room of Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a feature in last Sunday’s New York Times Style magazine says. The works are slated to be installed on every wall of the room sometime this month, and include a large painting of four smiling monkeys on the pediatric CAT Scan machine itself.

Koons’ installation is RxArt’s most amibitious to date. Brown told the Global Giving network that the idea to install artwork in a CAT Scan room came from her own personal experiences receiving a CT Scan.

“Rather than a scary experience in a cold white space, we hope children undergoing this test will feel like they are entering into a fantastic visual adventure.

“The fact that the Hope Children’s Hospital project is centered on Koons’s transformation of the CT Scan machine is especially significant to the origins of RxArt. The initial idea for RxArt came to me when I was undergoing a CT scan and found that the only way to distract myself from the frightening procedure was to imagine an artwork (a Matthew Ritchie painting) going up the wall and across the ceiling. By entering into this artist’s complex imagery, I was mentally transported out of the sterile environment of the hospital. RxArt was founded based on the belief that art has the ability to not only transcend but to transform its settings and viewers.”

Other projects by artists such as Rob Pruitt, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, and Will Cotton that have already been installed in various hospitals can be viewed here.

Via AO Art Observed.

The Art Newspaper sat down with Jeff Koons, the antithesis of the Chicago Conceptual Art style to talk about the new work, his focus, the battalion of artists he has working for him to produce the work, the current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London and his general take on art.

Read the full interview here.