KOONS AT FIFTY.(The Talk of the Town)(Jeff Koons)

Jeff Koons, the boy king of the art world, turned fifty the other day, and was given a surprise birthday party whose internal complexities and contradictions easily eclipsed the hoopla over Donald Trump's latest wedding. A hundred and fifty carefully chosen guests braved freezing weather to appear on time, between eight and eight-fifteen, at the warehouse-like Deitch Projects gallery, on Wooster Street, and you could tell right away that it was a major event because more than half the men were wearing neckties. Slides and film clips of Koons's life and work were projected on large screens. The giant, forty-foot-high "Puppy" coated in flowers, the basketballs immersed in water, the kitschy porcelain nude embracing the Pink Panther were interspersed with home movies of toddler Jeff at the beach and film clips of grownup Jeff in his studio, polishing one of his "Celebration" sculptures, whose endlessly delayed gestation nearly bankrupted Jeffrey Deitch and led to threatened lawsuits and savage in-fighting among several dealers, collectors, and museums. The day after the party, Deitch said, marvelling, "Isn't it amazing that there were all these people in the room who really hate each other?"

Justine Koons, Jeff's wife, had asked Deitch to organize the fete on remarkably short notice, and he had rounded up a group of high-profile co-hosts, who included Peter Brant, the publisher and collector, and his wife, Stephanie Seymour, the model. Deitch shook hands with his rival dealer Larry Gagosian, who stepped in two years ago to take over the still unfinished "Celebration" project, on which Deitch had spent seven years and several million dollars. Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim Museum's director, who had once pushed to present the "Celebration" series at the Guggenheim, as part of a Koons retrospective that never happened, showered his frosty benison upon one and all. Ileana Sonnabend was there in a wheelchair, making a rare public appearance. Koons left the Sonnabend gallery in 1992, when Ileana and her gallery director (and adopted son), Antonio Homem, balked at what struck them as the out-of-control costs of an earlier Koons mixed-media series, called "Made in Heaven," that documented the physical aspects of his relationship with his former wife, Ilona Staller, the Hungarian-born porn star known as La Cicciolina. He returned in 1997, but the truth is that today Koons, with his gargantuan ambitions and ruinous needs, is too big for any one gallery. His vision requires the faith and unlimited funds of many dealers, many collectors, and many museums.

Other artists have generally liked and admired Koons, and Julian Schnabel, Brice Marden, David Salle, Richard Prince, George Condo, Francesco Clemente, Elyn Zimmerman, Cecily Brown, John Currin, and Elizabeth Peyton all showed up to celebrate him. The networking was wall to wall. Curators and museum directors worked the ...