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拍品专文
“[I] found all these liquor ads that were targeted to drinking audiences at different income levels: at like a $10,000 income level, which is the lowest level, targeting people for beer and cheap liquor, up to the highest, at $45,000 and up, targeting people for Frangelico. So I had these images made into paintings. It’s very clear in these liquor advertisements that the more money you make, the more abstraction that’s laid on you. In this series, I was telling people not to give up their economic power—that this pursuit of luxury was a form of degradation and not to get debased by it but to maintain their economic power. I was really telling people to try to protect themselves from debasement.” (Koons, 2000, quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 340)
Throughout his career, Jeff Koons has repeatedly redefined the readymade and explored the margins of high art and mass culture. In 1986 he introduced a new series called Luxury and Degradation in which he called attention to the wealth of techniques marketing campaigns used to advertise alcoholic drinks and the strange economics that results in a variety of tactics being used to target specific slices of society. What Koons noticed was that the messages of ads aimed at the less affluent end of the socio-economic spectrum were significantly more overt than their counterparts intended for the upper crust, which leant toward abstract. Luxury and Degradation also includes stainless steel depictions of items associated with alcohol consumption, such as a travel bar and ice bucket, which are dazzlingly polished to match and, quite literally, allow for reflection. The artist encourages his viewers to be mindful of these advertising ploys that play on consumer vanity. He exposes the quicksand of consumerism and cautions that, in gratifying the campaigns of the advertisers, the consumer becomes complicit in an act of societal oppression. In works like Find a Quiet Table and others from this series, he encourages his audience to disentangle themselves from these stereotypes and a self-perpetuating system of social immobility and to not be lead astray by false promises of luxury.
Throughout his career, Jeff Koons has repeatedly redefined the readymade and explored the margins of high art and mass culture. In 1986 he introduced a new series called Luxury and Degradation in which he called attention to the wealth of techniques marketing campaigns used to advertise alcoholic drinks and the strange economics that results in a variety of tactics being used to target specific slices of society. What Koons noticed was that the messages of ads aimed at the less affluent end of the socio-economic spectrum were significantly more overt than their counterparts intended for the upper crust, which leant toward abstract. Luxury and Degradation also includes stainless steel depictions of items associated with alcohol consumption, such as a travel bar and ice bucket, which are dazzlingly polished to match and, quite literally, allow for reflection. The artist encourages his viewers to be mindful of these advertising ploys that play on consumer vanity. He exposes the quicksand of consumerism and cautions that, in gratifying the campaigns of the advertisers, the consumer becomes complicit in an act of societal oppression. In works like Find a Quiet Table and others from this series, he encourages his audience to disentangle themselves from these stereotypes and a self-perpetuating system of social immobility and to not be lead astray by false promises of luxury.