Jeff Koons: Not just the king of kitsch

Jeff Koons is a mega-artist, rivalled only by Damien Hirst in commercial success and fame. He is also underrated as a fantastic chronicler of the modern world. As a major new exhibition opens in London, he talks to Jonathan Jones.

It is 1988 and Michael Jackson sits surrounded by golden flowers, in golden clothes, hugging close to him his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. People walk around him and gawp. They don't know if they should laugh or feel creeped out or simply admire an innocent homage to genius.

This porcelain sculpture created by Jeff Koons was part of a series that raised him from being an artist known only by other artists to a celebrity in his own right. The series called Banality brought him the fame he had craved through the 1980s, since he first came from Pennsylvania to New York and supported himself in various ways, including dealing in commodities, while exhibiting vacuum cleaners in illuminated vitrines. In a photograph taken to advertise the exhibition, a young Koons poses with a class of small children, chalk in hand, a beatific smile on his face. On the blackboard he has written "Exploitthe masses" and "Banality as saviour". The other works included Ushering in Banality, a carved wooden polychrome group of two angels and a tracksuited boy tending a pig with a green ribbon round its neck; a porcelain figure of Leonardo da Vinci's Saint John the Baptist clutching a pig; and a statue of two grinning idiots nursing a row of blue puppies.

The art of Jeff Koons creates a world beyond taste. It rubs the least respectable mass-cultural artefacts into the noses of people brought up to think art is about the good, the true and the lofty. Two decades after he gave the world Banality, I meet him at London's Serpentine Gallery. It is the eve of his exhibition, Popeye Series, which stars the famous spinach-eating sailor and an inflatable lobster. The king of kitsch has never looked more kingly than he does now. Jeff Koons in 2009 is a mega-artist, a business artist, rivalled in commercial success and fame only by his friend Damien Hirst - "I've always felt very close to people like Damien, the Chapmans, Sarah Lucas." Unsurprisingly, as they are all visibly influenced by his work.

He employs more than 100 people in his New York studio, and before the markets crashed was selling individual works for more than $20m. That figure was cut in half in his most recent sales, but he doesn't seem too rattled, and with good reason; Koons aged 54 - however many insults his critics hurl - is treated with increasing respect, and even reverence, by museums. In 2008 alone he had a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, a big exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and a show at the Palace of Versailles. Tate Modern, meanwhile, has opened a remarkable room of his works that form part of the new national collection donated by his former dealer Anthony d'Offay - "I think what Anthony did was really very generous."

And yet it hasn't been as smooth a rise as the glittering reflective edifice of today's Koons corporation might suggest. After Banality, he wondered what to do next.

"I just felt like I became an art star with my Banality show," Koons tells me. "I'll add another little star on my shoulder" - he found himself thinking - "and I'll be a film star. But what's the easiest way into film? To make, like, a porn film. So I thought, OK I'll make this billboard as if I'm starring in a movie, and it'll star myself and that woman that I saw in this magazine, this Cicciolina."

La Cicciolina is the working name of Hungarian-born porn star Ilona Staller, whose fame in Italy in the 1980s and 90s led to her being elected as an MP and later founding her own Party of Love. It wasn't her politics that Koons was drawn to, however, when he chanced upon a picture of her in a magazine. He promptly turned it into a sculpture of a woman lying in bubble bath being admired by a pig and two penguins.

He and Staller never did make a porn film. What emerged instead from their meeting was a series of sculptures and photographs portraying them having sex in many positions, settings and costumes.

It was called Made in Heaven and, in my opinion, was his greatest work. It was, says Koons, about "removing guilt and shame. I saw the Masaccio painting in Florence" - Masaccio's 15th century picture of Adam and Eve being cast out of paradise in the Brancacci Chapel - "and I was very moved by it; you know you see the guilt and shame that they're feeling, Adam and Eve." He wanted to create the answer to this painting - "a body of work that is kind of about after the fall, but all of this guilt and shame is removed".

To create Made in Heaven he borrowed all the trappings of Staller's own art. "I hired her and I used her same photographer, the same place where they developed the film. I wanted her to wear the same costumes, the same backdrops, because everything was a ready-made."

Koons is fascinated by sex - it keeps coming into our conversation, in a conversation about beauty for instance. "If I think of the word beauty, I think of a vagina", he replies. "I think of the vaginal - personally. That's what comes to mind for me, or Praxiteles' sculpture, the ass ... " The ass he's referring to is that of the Venus of Knidos, carved by the ancient Greek sculptor, Praxiteles, and displayed in a temple that allowed pilgrims to view the goddess of love from all angles. Classical writers tell that enthusiastic beholders stained the marble statue with their ejaculations. And this is a clue as to why he's keen on sex, as an artist. Eroticism has always been the territory par excellence where lofty ideals are betrayed by basic physical drives: where the beautiful becomes banal. This is why it made sense for Koons to explore pornography as art - because when we lust we are all Jeff Koons.

Staller, however, was not the ready-made object he originally paid for. At first it was bliss. They married. The lovemaking depicted in Made in Heaven bore fruit. But in December 1994, after their son Ludwig was born, they divorced. When I ask if he thinks people understand the images in Made in Heaven, his reply shocks me.

"I don't think people see them very often because I destroyed a lot of the works. I was going through a custody situation for my son, and Ilona kept trying to pull the work down to a level that it would be viewed not as artwork but as pornography, so I ended up just destroying most of the works because of that." In other words, Staller was promoting the works as part of her own image and oeuvre - which is not surprising since they were as much pornography as art, whatever he says.

Still, he is proud of some of the works in Made in Heaven. "I think Ilona's Asshole is a wonderful work. It's really about acceptance of the self and the confidence to display one's genitalia or display one's asshole."

In 1997 the art critic Robert Hughes pronounced a damning postmortem on Koons's career in his book American Visions. Koons, he said, "was the last art star to be cranked out by the Manhattan mechanism", a "starry-eyed opportunist", his pseudo-Baroque sculptures a calculated and obvious attempt to manipulate collectors through their desire to be "challenged". You might almost think that "Koons had psyched himself into thinking he was a latter-day Bernini. Or was it a pose? By now it hardly matters."

It hardly mattered because, in the years after he exhibited the most intimate moments of his brief marriage, Koons faded from view. After the marriage broke down, he got involved in a bitter custody fight over their son. In the eyes of detractors - Robert Hughes is not the only one - Koons is a fake, a poseur, a sterile manufacturer of heartless kitsch. But portraying your love life in graphic detail and then being humiliated by the collapse of the relationship you vaunted does not strike me as the work of an arch-manipulator or an emotionless fraud.

Koons never let go of the idea that he could get Ludwig back. That estrangement from his now teenage son has become part of the meaning of his art. He was in a hole and he kept digging - by making art about his pain.

When his son was born, he became interested in the simple shapes and colours of the baby's first toys. He set out to make art that a small child could relate to. But then events changed the meaning of the sculptures he planned. They became a way, in his imagination, of reaching out to the child he couldn't see. "I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realise I was thinking about him very much during these times . . . that he can look and see my dad's thinking about me, but to also embed in these things something that is bigger than all of us."

In 1992, Koons started work on the Celebration Series. His plan was to create colossal reproductions of easter eggs, party hats, valentine hearts, balloon animals and other "celebratory" images in shiny coloured metal. It turned out to be hugely expensive, and his domestic crisis didn't help. "I went through the divorce, the custody situation ... the work was very expensive to create and it took longer than we anticipated so works were placed at less expensive amounts than what it cost even to produce."

I ask about the emotional meaning of these works. "The sculpture Party Hat - that's my son's little birthday hat that he wore just one day before my ex-wife took him away."

The Celebration Series was eventually completed and, in 2000, when it started to be shown in museums around the world, it immediately renewed and deepened his reputation, at least with those prepared to give him a chance. When you gaze into the reflective blue surface of his Cracked Egg, your own face and those of the other people going by float in a seductive yet spooky polished metal mirror; a perfection that has been broken open, leaving part of the shell on the ground. There's an eerie power to these works that goes well beyond Koons's claim to be a celebratory artist. They are joyous lamentations; broken mirrors of a world losing touch with its loved ones.

Koons, the man who fell in love with his own ready-made, has a haunting piece of emotional advice for us all. "Inanimate objects are great but they're just inanimate objects and externalised images," he points out after spending years trying to connect with a faraway child by making monuments to the infantile. All that matters in art and life is "actual human interaction".

Koons seems to be constantly stretching, twisting, amplifying and reconfiguring the ordinary to make it strange. He has an eye for form, which he sees like his hero Salvador Dalí through a hypersexual filter. I show him a picture of Lips, a fantastically energetic painting he created in 2000 in which lips and an eye dance in the air with yellow pieces of sweetcorn. "That corn for me is a reference to Dalí. Dalí always loved corn ... but if you put two kernels together you have an ass." There speaks a sculptor.

Jeff Koons is an artist not of bland manufactured sheen but of edgy contradictions. On the one hand he wants to experience a world of innocent childlike gratification, of toys and party hats - he revels in telling me about his second marriage, six children in all, and two grandchildren from his older daughter, Shannon, 34. On the other hand, here is a man whose life was changed by his marriage to a porn star and her refusal to continue as his living art object.

It's a tale of American demands: Koons is at once determined to be pleased like a child and hungry to be satiated as an adult. The Popeye Series continues this impossible quest. It is dedicated to showing a series of works based around metal sculptures of inflatable toys. There are inflatable dolphins, inflatable lobsters, all turned into metal. The lobster is a homage to Dalí's Lobster Telephone. He tells me he identifies with Popeye's motto - "I yam what I yam." But on the cover he has designed for today's G2, he emphasises Popeye's muscular arm with its expanding tattoo of a tank. Is it a political comment? A phallic object? Both? It's interesting, and ambivalent and American and ludicrous.

Jeff Koons is a brave and original artist. His art declares the weirdness of its materials, its themes, its maker and its public. He insists there is no irony in what he does. When he's gone, this denial will be forgotten and he will surely be acclaimed as a satirist. He says his art is about liberation and acceptance and embracing the mainstream. Is it also a disturbing image of the modern world? "I really don't believe in judgments; it could be looking at political systems, social hierarchies and all these areas."

The very night after our interview, the death of Michael Jackson is announced. On the Friday I ask the sculptor of Michael Jackson and Bubbles for his comment. "We have lost a great artist." But look at it. White faced and hugging his chimpanzee, Jackson is not portrayed as the talented song-and-dance man everyone seems to want to remember, but an icon of the banal. Perhaps Jeff Koons is a secret moralist. Perhaps he is a great artist and perhaps he is just a great symptom. Whatever he is he has an eye for the pathologies of our time.

• This article was amended on 30 June 2009. The original said that Koons's Berlin exhibition was on the Museum Island. This has been corrected.

via: guardian.co.uk