Now, he's suing, saying things like "'Ponzi meets
The Producers" in the complaint,
reports Courthouse News Service.
“Defendants’ enterprise of ostensible civil corruption bleeds collectors of deposits and payments, drawing on their funding without supplying a product in exchange therefor,” the complaint states. “While the design, manufacture and completion of the so-called Jeff Koons sculptures wallow at best and are continually and fraudulently postponed by a factor of years and contracted collectors wait interminably for delivery, Larry Gagosian and Jeff Koons live extravagant lifestyles financed in part by inappropriate and highly questionable practices underwritten by plaintiff and other collectors.”
Tananbaum says the refusal of Gagosian and Koons to identify the foundry that is purportedly manufacturing the sculptures keeps collectors in the dark as they manufacture false hope. Meantime the money Gagosian and Koons leech from collectors through “brutal payment plans” is used to fulfill a host of other obligations including “the manufacture of sculptures or other contracted “artistic” obligations commissioned at an earlier date by similarly duped collectors and/or to line the pockets of defendants.”
“The ‘estimated completion dates’ supplied by defendants to the collectors are a sham from the very outset,” the complaint states. “Defendants have and had no intention of completing the sculptures according to a completion and delivery schedule. At heart, this interest-free loan system – unbeknownst to the collectors – is less about creating timeless works of art and more about creating an ouroboros by which defendants maintain a never-depleting source of funds at the expense of eager and trusting collectors.”
My questions are: What were the terms of the contract you signed, you rich knucklehead? And: Is the complaint a work of art? And: Why can I never remember what an
ouroboros is and have to look it up every damned time?
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38 comments:
I can remember what it is. I just can't spell it for the life of me. Ouru...Orou...ouruoboros?
Damn it!
The last living ourobouros is in the Ougadougou Zoo.
People who buy Koons art get what they deserve. Scams designed to separate the rich from their money are not as easy as they look and Koons deserves some credit for keeping this one going for as long as he has.
The universsl symbol of a guy sucking his own dick. Never has to leave the house.
Why can I never remember what an ouroboros is and have to look it up every damned time?
You clearly haven't read enough E. R. Eddison.
The rich knucklehead can pretend he's the Pope hassling with Michelangelo. "When are you going to finish that ceiling ?"
How can you be that rich and that stupid at the same time?
The invisible sculpture is his finest creation.
I thought of Julius II and Michelangelo, though I think the relationship was more like Michelangelo saying: "When are you going to pay me?"
You need an ouroboros tag.
I'll sell him something similar for $4.6 million. It's even more exclusive.
Rich knuckleheads and their First World problems!
You just know these pretentious jerks are UpperWestSide Liberals, doncha?
If he wanted interest on his money he should have put it in the contract.
I assume Koons is so much in demand that you basically have to pay to get on a waiting list and the market determines what you will have to pay.
I'm sure the contract has terms that say how long you have to wait (including the possibility of forever) and whether you can withdraw and what you get back if you do.
Koons could write "The Deal of the Art"
While I realize that such things are only playgrounds for the rich and foolish, but buying "art," bottles of win, and other collectibles is simply fraught with danger, if you consider losing considerable amounts of money dangerous.
He must have thought it was a good investment to get a particular price (even with the date of delivery left open). He must have predicted that the prices for Koons art would go up, so the thing that he bought for $X would, after time passes, be worth $2X or more. So that's why there's no interest on the money you put in the dealer's hands.
@AA,
I'm sure the contract has terms that say how long you have to wait (including the possibility of forever) and whether you can withdraw and what you get back if you do.
I'm wondering if the contract has the backing of an insurer who pays back the patron in full if Koons dies or becomes disabled before the sculpture is delivered.
I bet it's the patron who has to pay for the insurance, too.
I am not going to defend the business practices of this particular sculptor. A relative by marriage is a sculptor who has had some good years selling his pieces.Currently times are bad. Several years ago, the sculptor didn't examine closely enough the contract that a Middle Eastern client presented to him. Result: the client got his sculpture, but the sculptor made nothing after taking out foundry expenses and gallery commission.
This reeks of a pre-crash Madoff investment scam. ARM is 100% correct on this case.
He should have bought it through the Althouse Amazon portal. Delivery by tomorrow, if he had Amazon Prime.
As an artist, I need to try this approach to making money.
The contract and its suckers was the work of art. Bravo, Koons, bravo!
Having to look it up every damn time is oddly appropriate.
gspencer said...
While I realize that such things are only playgrounds for the rich and foolish, but buying "art," bottles of win, and other collectibles is simply fraught with danger, if you consider losing considerable amounts of money dangerous.
I used to think this but these markets have proven more stable and remunerative than I expected. One example that I have followed a bit is classic cars. Over the years I have have passed on the opportunity to buy a good condition E-type Jag and a Jensen Interceptor at very reasonable prices. Very stupid decisions. The Jensen less so than the Jag, but both have done well. They hit a relatively large market, older upper middle class men with money to burn before they die.
OK. He can donate to a charity the contractual right to recieve the ART when it is delivered. I could find an appraiser for him. And the IRS seldom challenges these deduction. That will net him a 30-40% return.
And this is the destination of most ART bought by collectors anyway. Once they are tired of displaying and moving it around, they cut their losses. That is how so much ART ends up in and around public bldgs, in basements and parks.
"Why can I never remember what an ouroboros is and have to look it up every damned time?"
It happens to the best of us. My frustration is reading a history book with great interest and being unable to remember hardly anything of the contents a week later.
I think it is related to age.
If you read the classic novel The Worm Ouroboros, I doubt you'll ever again forget what it means. Worked for me.
The rich knucklehead is a Manhattanite, with an ourobouros from the outer boroughs.
The law disfavors trying to turn a breach of contract action into a fraud action.
Is he just now figuring out that Koons is a hack and a fraud?
I mean, previously he was only a figurative fraud, but ...
The Ouroboros inspired the conceptual model of the Benzene Ring. Of course, Jordan Peterson uses the Ouroboros as a central graphic in Maps of Meaning:
This potential has been represented as the self-devouring dragon (most commonly) because this image (portrayed in Figure 29: The Uroboros – Precosmogonic Dragon of Chaos 274) aptly symbolizes the union of incommensurate opposites. The uroboros is simultaneously representative of two antithetical primordial elements. As a snake, the uroboros is a creature of the ground, of matter; as a bird (a winged animal), it is a creature of the air, of the sky, of spirit. The uroboros symbolizes the union of known (associated with spirit) and unknown (associated with matter), explored and unexplored; symbolizes the juxtaposition of the “masculine” principles of security, tyranny and order with the “feminine” principles of darkness, dissolution, creativity and chaos. Furthermore, as a snake, the uroboros has the capacity to shed its skin – to be “reborn.” Thus, it also represents the possibility of transformation, and stands for the knower, who can transform chaos into order, and order into chaos. The uroboros stands for, or constitutes, everything that is as of yet unencountered, prior to its differentiation as a consequence of active exploration and classification. It is the source of all the information that makes up the determinate world of experience – and is, simultaneously, the birth-place of the experiencing subject.
The only sham here is the claim that someone who would buy a Koons work counts as an art collector.
readering said...The law disfavors trying to turn a breach of contract action into a fraud action.
And yet Ponzi schemes are illegal despite the fact that in theory a whole bunch of people end up making money (before the thing falls apart).
Ann Althouse said...
I'm sure the contract has terms that say how long you have to wait (including the possibility of forever) and whether you can withdraw and what you get back if you do.
Sure, but even if it doesn't it seems like the suit is asserting that the artist is not attempting to uphold their end of the bargain no matter what the actual wait time would/will be. Even if the contract said "the artist will complete the artwork sold here after he's done with other work commissioned first" and specified no "expected" time period it'd still be fraudulent on the artist's part if they were not taking any action to complete any works, right?
Write better contracts, sure. Understand that if an item/artist is so in demand they can dictate terms you may get a bad deal when bargaining with them (the "price" you pay will include their possibly-bad conditions), sure. But none of that excuses fraud--even people who sign bad contracts shouldn't be subject to fraud.
I might argue there's a dollar-value being rendered to the art patron who's social cred is enhanced by being able to say, presumably at every dinner, function and opportunity: 'Koons is making a piece for me.'
Koons was and still is the most fraudulent artist on the planet. I don't begrudge his having a studio and using assistants. Artists have done that at least since Rubens. No, what I dislike is his "subject matter." Anyone at all could put two dead flies and a deflated basketball in water, and call it art, but Koons is the only one who actually gets to. Anyone could cut a calf in half lengthwise and preserve it in formaldehyde, but only in Koons-land is that a work of art. As for all his shiny Mickey Mouse-inspired paraphernalia, I really, really hope he has his royalties paid up, because the Disney Corp. is serious about that stuff.
A a good friend who graduated from the Columbus College of Art told me, sculpture is something you back into when looking at art.
I have a cat that tries to eat its tail...
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