In the studio with art’s greatest showman

Can a visit to the New York HQ of Jeff Koons persuade Rowan Pelling that there’s substance beneath his shine?

If Jeff Koons were a country, he’d be Switzerland: immaculate, very rich, controlled to the point of OCD, and beloved of the corporate classes. It’s hard not to be seduced by the dramatic landscape once you cross the border, while wondering what dark forces might be unleashed if you were to suddenly lob a custard pie.

Koons’s New York studio, an innocuous warehouse close to the High Line in West Chelsea, has the intense air of a medical research facility, despite the occasional sculpture of a schmaltzy porcelain ballerina or blow-up lobster. Inside, a dozen or so assistants are staring in rapt concentration at computer screens. I’m looking over the shoulder of the young man nearest me, pondering images resembling 3D molecular structures, when suddenly, quietly, Jeff is among us: a neat, compact, bright-eyed man, dressed top to toe in indigo. At 63, he has a full head of brown hair, perfect teeth and the calm charisma of an illusionist.

Koons is a practised shock jock. My closest connection to his work so far came when I curated two sales of erotic art for Sotheby’s. One featured a private room containing explicit photographs of the artist having sex with his then-wife, Ilona Staller, better known as the

Italian porn star and political activist La Cicciolina. (The marriage ended in 1994 with a protracted custody battle over their son, Ludwig; in 2002 Koons married the artist Justine

Wheeler and they went on to have six children.)

The photographs were part of his 1990-91 series Made in Heaven which combined pornographic tropes, religious iconography and a lurid Ken-and-Barbie vibe. I’ve been told that if I mention these works, Koons will almost certainly cite one particular X-rated picture, and he does: “There’s a painting called Ilona’s Asshole that has a nice correlation with [Courbet’s] Origin of the World,” he says. “It has that type of presence. I’m very proud of that painting.” Placing his own controversial work firmly in the orbit of an acknowledged masterpiece is a typical Koons manoeuvre. Not to mention his sly vengeful gesture of giving it a title that yokes his ex’s name to a term interchangeable with jerk.

I’ve been invited to Koons’s studio to discuss his forthcoming exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which will show 17 major works, of which 14 have never been exhibited in

Britain before. The Ashmolean proposed the show after a littleknown Oxford undergraduate body, the Edgar Wind Society for art history, gave Koons its inaugural award for contemporary art and he flew over to accept the accolade in person. “I mean, it was an absolute honour,” he tells me. “Just interacting with the students was so meaningful to me.”

I’m a bit baffled by this. It’s hard enough to persuade London-based luminaries to grace British students with their presence, let alone an art superstar from NYC. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact we Britons haven’t typically lauded Koons to the same degree as the French, who have given him vast shows at the Pompidou and Versailles and made him an Officier of the French Legion d’Honneur.

But then, Koons is the art world’s ultimate Mr Marmite. The art historian Norman Rosenthal is a vocal fan – and has co-curated the Ashmolean show – while the late