Funhouse.(Koons retrospective at Museum of Contemporary Art)

There is something nightmarish about Jeff Koons. The fifty-three-year-old American enchanter and provocateur is a major artist, in the old sense of one who edits the past and sketches the future of an art--in this case, sculpture. (Koons's uncannily mediocre paintings suggest an insensibility in two dimensions that is as amazing, in its way, as his genius in three.) Major artists X-ray the cultures that give rise to them. A Koons retrospective that has opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago occasions queasy wonderment, on the order of "We've come to this?," and the perhaps reluctant conclusion "Uh-huh." It confirms Koons's scope as an artist unconfined by the conventional art world, whose work addresses everybody, including but not limited to those who may discern influences of Courbet, Brancusi, Duchamp, Dali, Warhol, and Disney. I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons's famous "Puppy," the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids' unequivocal verdict.

The material mastery, conceptual perfect pitch, and idealist beauty of most of the objects on display in Chicago defy resistance. Can you dislike "Balloon Dog (Orange)" (1994-2000), a ten-foot-high representation, in chromium stainless steel with a coppery tint, of a cartoony canine formed with twists in a long balloon? (A yellowish twin of the work is one of three Koonses currently installed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, where it gathers funhouse reflections of viewers and the surrounding city, under blue skies turned velvety green.) If you manage not to enjoy the lustrous pooch, I don't understand you. But if you're afflicted by an attendant feeling of intellectual free fall, in a vacuum of identifiable emotion, we can talk. Koons is hugely significant--grandly engaging themes of childhood, wealth, sex, and (as with an aqualung cast in bronze) death--while finally signifying precious little. That's my nightmare: an intimation that intelligence is obsolete in a world where things are either blazingly obvious or pitch dark.

One of Koons's early works reproduces a photograph of him, at the age of six, wielding a crayon and gazing out with the unearthly confidence that remains his usual mien today. He was born in York, Pennsylvania. His father was a furniture dealer and interior decorator, his mother a housewife and seamstress. (She made wedding dresses.) At the age of twelve, he was painting copies of Old Masters, which his father sold in his store. He studied art in Baltimore and, for an important year, at the Art Institute of Chicago. A companion show at the M.C.A., "Everything's Here: Jeff Koons and His Experience of Chicago," features local artists, the so-called "Imagists"--Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, H. C. Westermann, and others--whose brassy populism gave him a maverick orientation that came in handy when he tackled New York, in 1977. The School of the Art Institute awarded Koons an honorary doctorate this year. In his acceptance speech, he urged the students to participate boldly in the world, using art as a "platform" for themselves. (He likes that word, attributing its implications for him to his mother's family, which was active in Pennsylvania politics.) Making the graduates a gift of his ambition, he mimed passing a basketball to them. I have been told that hundreds of hands flew up to catch the spectral orb.

In New York, Koons manned the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art, evincing formidable salesmanship while immersing himself in the collection. He staked his budding penchant for expensively fabricated art by working as a commodities broker on Wall Street for six years. (Today, he has a factory in Chelsea with ninety regular assistants.) Almost from the start, his work has come in thematic series, or product lines. "Pre-New" assemblages of plastic flowers, toys, and mirrors gave way to "The New": fluorescent-lit, spotless vacuum cleaners, hermetically sealed in Plexiglas cases. ...