In my research on recipes, I’m often engaged in discussions of authorship and ownership. Who can be called an ‘author’ of a recipe? What does authorship of a text entail (in terms of copyright law or social norms) and who gets to be an author when freshly published recipes are based on older recipes or dishes prepared by others? These questions are equally animating in the visual arts, as creative production is collaborative in both recipe writing and art-making. Many famous artists, such as Jeff Koons (of balloon dog fame) and Chihuly produce work with large teams of skilled makers in several media. How then is ‘authorship’ or ‘artistry’ attributed in the case of co-creation?

The first field trip organized by the Creative Inspiration and the Cultural Commons working group at the Ostrom Workshop was to see a talk given by Jeff Koons on the subject of Art and Technology. We tuned into the event and then brought our notebooks to Mother Bear’s pizza for a discussion about the lecture and how it intersects with our research (this is, for me, absolutely living the dream). I’ll share in this blog post some of what we discussed regarding authorship and collaboration.

To cut to the chase: I argue that in this campus talk, Jeff Koons portrayed artistic authorship and authority as residing in having the idea or vision for the work, and successfully making that vision appear in the work by communicating with others to produce physical objects that are of sufficient quality, as decided by the artist.

One of the moderators, Associate Professor of Painting Caleb Weintraub, opened the discussion by sharing a connection between IU and Jeff Koons’ work: a graduate of the art program had gone on to join Jeff Koons’ team of fabricators. This IU grad reported back to the faculty and students in Bloomington that Koons’ standards for production were incredibly high – the slightest imperfection on the mirrored surface of a gazing ball warranted its destruction and a fresh start.

Koons agreed with pride that he requires perfection beyond the practical in his objects. When a fabricator had completed a piece but left the bottom unfinished (because “no one is going to see it”), Koons insisted the fabricator finish even the unseen parts of the piece. “It is a loss of trust” to leave it unfinished, whereas finishing the bottom (which a viewer would never see) “communicated care and respect to the viewer.” In this opening anecdote, Koons portrays himself as the visionary with high standards who must struggle to convince his employees to produce good enough work.

Koons went on to describe his career as a result of following his interests and focusing on them; that he is driven by a desire to make things he is curious about, that he wants in his work to continue to “participate, transcend, become.” His work is often lauded for being technically difficult and flawless in appearance, like the shiny metal of his rabbit sculpture, a success only as a result of its perfection as an illusion of a mylar balloon made from stainless steel. Koons said that his focus on these ambitious works was a desire to overcome a challenge: “in achieving something I was able to transcend.”

Weintraub asked if Koons works with a large team of fabricators as an intentional move away from the idea of the ‘lone artist.’ Koons completely ignored this question, and only after Weintraub asked him a second time did Koons engage with the question of co-creation.

Koons explained that early in his career he wanted to make a piece with welded metal bars, but that he didn’t know how to weld. So he hired a welder. He wanted to cast a piece in bronze but didn’t own a foundry or cast his own pieces, so he hired a casting foundry to cast a rubber snorkel into bronze. This started the pattern of hiring fabricators to produce the works Koons envisioned. Koons emphasized that in working with people who actually produced the objects in bronze, wood, porcelain, or steel, his role was primarily communicative. “I would have to stay on top of them,” he explained, asking them to make changes and pushing them to improve their quality to meet his standards. He emphasized that he had to take on the responsibility to communicate his vision, repeating each request “three times, because people don’t listen the first time.” (This line evoked a chuckle from the audience – perhaps they identified more with Koons than with the fabricators).

To summarize Koons’ portrayal of artistry and authorship in this talk, the work of the artist consists in:
1) having the idea for the work
2) getting people to make that idea materially real through communication
3) determining when the work is made to his standards of quality, and thereby complete.

The work of the fabricators, by contrast, is to strive to create an object in accordance with the artist’s vision and standards of quality. The fabricator, according to Koons in this talk, is an employee who must be exhorted to work up to standard. The artist, as author, visionary, and employer, retains sole claim over the finished object.