Top 50 Jeff Koons Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.”

— Jeff Koons

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2. “My favorite activity is to be with my family.”

— Jeff Koons

3. “If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it’s just about getting the outline of the forest.”

— Jeff Koons

4. “Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.”

— Jeff Koons

5. “Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.”

— Jeff Koons

6. “Art is about profundity. It’s about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.”

— Jeff Koons

7. “I think about my work every minute of the day.”

— Jeff Koons

8. “I thought I would call myself a pig before the viewer could, so they could only think more of me.”

— Jeff Koons

9. “Whenever you finish an artwork and the viewer comes and views it, at that moment you’ve given up control.”

— Jeff Koons

10. “I’m interested in power.”

— Jeff Koons

11. “Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that’s what art is.”

— Jeff Koons

12. “The job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is. It’s not about the object, and it’s not about the image; it’s about the viewer. That’s where the art happens.”

— Jeff Koons

13. “I don’t believe that artists really are interested in money. That’s not the motivation for art.”

— Jeff Koons

14. “When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them.”

— Jeff Koons

15. “The moment we live in is a great time to make art. We have different technologies to play with, and we’re left with the opportunity to focus on our work.”

— Jeff Koons

16. “My work is a support system for people to feel good about themselves.”

— Jeff Koons

17. “People have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that’s more associated with being cynical-it’s kind of a put-down.”

— Jeff Koons

18. “A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.”

— Jeff Koons

19. “I try to create work that doesn’t make viewers feel they’re being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.”

— Jeff Koons

20. “I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.”

— Jeff Koons

21. “Ive always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. Thats what Ive always done.”

— Jeff Koons

22. “As morality seems to have supplanted civilization, I move on to the spiritual.”

— Jeff Koons

23. “The first thing that any good artist has to develop is a sense of independence from the artworld. What really destroys a young artist is insecurity, the fear that everything could be taken away at any moment.”

— Jeff Koons

24. “I always liked Disney films. To this day I think ‘Bambi’ is great.”

— Jeff Koons

25. “I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.”

— Jeff Koons

26. “Nothing can touch me now – I’m Jeff Koons and my art can defend me !”

— Jeff Koons

27. “I’m basically the idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.”

— Jeff Koons

28. “I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery.”

— Jeff Koons

29. “I would prefer a normal-sized breast, or a small breast or whatever, and that it be natural, than to understand that it was just some jelly in there.”

— Jeff Koons

30. “I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.”

— Jeff Koons

31. “I don’t think irony is about judgment; I think irony is something like, “Oh, that’s interesting,” because it’s not something I think one starts off to achieve. I think it’s just something that presents itself. And if it does, I find it’s usually optimistic, not negative in its terms.”

— Jeff Koons

32. “I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.”

— Jeff Koons

33. “Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I’m always looking for source material.”

— Jeff Koons

34. “I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art – that’s wonderful.”

— Jeff Koons

35. “It’s wonderful to make a lot of money, to be able to take care of my family, to have the facilities I have and really support the people the studio’s involved with. But at the end of the day I’m quite simple as an artist-it’s really about the power of art.”

— Jeff Koons

36. “Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.”

— Jeff Koons

37. “Art helped give me confidence.”

— Jeff Koons

38. “As an artist, I’ve always wanted to participate in the dialogue of art with other artists.”

— Jeff Koons

39. “I believe that my art gets across the point that I’m in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I’m speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.”

— Jeff Koons

40. “If I physically made every work myself, I would get only one or two paintings done a year, if that.”

— Jeff Koons

41. “My process of being inspired is very intuitive. Im constantly following my interest.”

— Jeff Koons

42. “I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.”

— Jeff Koons

43. “I’d have to say I’ve become more aware of my communal responsibility.”

— Jeff Koons

44. “Even before I had children I wanted the intensity of my life to get greater. I wanted to feel things more strongly. I wanted my intellectual parameters to expand. But it comes back to your own desire to be engaged and to live up to your parameters.”

— Jeff Koons

45. “I’m always working. If I’m not in my studio I become quite nervous.”

— Jeff Koons

46. “I’m interested in power. I’m interested in the kind of polarities and equilibriums that take place within sexuality and philosophy and sociology. So in Versailles, in this type of setting, you have a place that is about absolute control, where everything has been thought about.”

— Jeff Koons

47. “It’s about the production of the work. I need my workers to stay focused.”

— Jeff Koons

48. “I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I’m a messenger.”

— Jeff Koons

49. “I like my drawings to be direct. I don’t generally work on them for too long, but that doesn’t mean that they are not works in their own right.”

— Jeff Koons

50. “I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.”

— Jeff Koons