Jeff Koons

Caring. Some may say that people are perfectionists. I don’t believe in perfectionism because I think that’s like a fetish. Like a dog chasing its tail. But really caring about something is a way of transcending. Through making something the best that you possibly can, you’re able to show [how you care] to people. You’re able to communicate respect. 
I believe that these watches are the gesture of both Hublot and myself to show respect and caring to people. They’re great timepieces. I think they’re very informative about the history of humanity. But at the same time, they’re very much about the moment that we live in. The world, the opportunities, the abundance of information that we have… I mean, this is the most exciting time for humanity, as far as dealing with change. 

I’m an intuitive artist, so I always do things very intuitively. I had a show called Banality in 1988, and it was a very popular show. I remember a journalist asking me, after this huge success, if I was afraid if it was gonna leave me, and I thought, what a strange thing to ask an artist after having this huge success. And so, I thought about what I do. And the only thing I do, and I think it’s the only thing that anybody can ever do, is I follow my interests. I can’t really follow your interests. If you follow your interests and really focus on those interests, it takes you to a universal vocabulary. And in this universal vocabulary, time and space bend. And, you know, you're connected to something that’s greater than the self, and is universal. It’s a metaphysical experience. It never fails.

The first dogs I put in my artwork were some inflatables. But then I started to depict animals in the Made in Heaven series [in glass], I also did Puppy, [the sculpture] made out of 16,000 flowers. So I love different materials because they all have an inner voice. I was able to give them a spiritual quality through wood that carvers would work with for the Church in northern Italy. So working with a living material, there’s a certain spirituality. And working with stainless steel, I would work with it for the durability. [As well as] the abstraction of the reflection, and how it affirms the viewer. And the permanence of it… Stainless steel is like “Okay, I'm gonna stand alone.” It’s an extremely durable material.

For me this is a balloon dog, it’s not necessarily a poodle, but you can see it as a poodle of course. For me, I think the balloon dog is iconic because it’s a symbol, which may be quite old: like a ritualistic object of understanding our interactions with the world. If we look at a balloon dog, we think about its interface, its membrane to the external world. It’s like our skin. And it’s right here on the front lines of interaction with life experience. It’s right here, right now. It’s a metaphor for life. 

Using past artworks is a way that I can show respect and homage to those artists. And I can bring those works to the attention of a larger public. At the same time, I can interact with them. And conceptually make something which can represent a dialogue that’s even faster. Faster than myself and than art. And that can represent everything. The gazing ball itself is like a rabbit hole – to go into that artwork, and to discover the love that that artists may have had, and who they may be giving it up to. I’ll do a Rubens work, and you'll find that he was originally doing an homage to Hans Holbein. All these are different ways of showing connectivity. That’s what I’m interested in.

Ready-mades are a vocabulary. They can be articulated. Now, there are copyrights, trademarks, all these different things... But the idea is to try to communicate to people that everything is accessible, and available to them to absorb and interact with. It's like being able to have the most complete vocabulary. 

I think that there is a sense of abundance in these watches. Both designs, the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog, and the MP-14 Origin, have a vastness in their sense of reference. They feel that they haven’t been confined to a small dialogue. At the same time, they celebrate the crafts: the history of defining, even philosophically, the idea of where ideas come from. Think about Aristotle and Socrates: the idea of these pure forms, like a chair. It’s all about the idea of making things. I’d like to think of these watches as having that whole history of Western philosophy in them.

I did not think of the flag. Generally I tend to work with a lot of primary colours. I like the world! As a child, I would love to lay down in the backyard at home, and look at the sky and just enjoy the blue of the sky, or roll over and enjoy the green of the grass. Red is a colour that tends to symbolise a kind of passion, and in silver, there’s a pure kind of reflection that celebrates the purity of light and the affirmation of our own reflection. I believe these colours are kind of optimistic.