Mining magnate Brett Kebble may be cowering from the spotlight after his recent business setbacks, but his art awards are about to scale new heights. The Brett Kebble Art Awards will be judged next year by the art world’s biggest show-off: America’s high priest of kitsch, Jeff Koons.
Koons, a one-time stockbroker born in 1955, is best known for his enormous pornographic photographs and sculptures depicting himself and ex-wife Cicciolina in ”a variety of love-making positions”.
Cicciolina, who is also known as Hungarian-born porn actress Ilona Staller, won a seat in Italy’s Parliament in 1987 for the country’s Radical Party.
Koons’s other masterpiece is a priceless gold-coloured porcelain titled Michael Jackson and Bubbles, depicting Jacko embracing an ape in circus clothes.
Awards organisers are adamant that the ”acquisition” of Koons as a Kebble awards judge has nothing to do with the tribulations of their boss and that the appointment was suggested by an independent curatorial team.
Speaking from a beach in Greece, awards spokesperson David Barritt said Koons’s appointment was ”not a commercial venture. He’s not charging, he didn’t ask for any money. Never has a judge asked us for money and Jeff is no exception.” He conceded, however, that a ”modest honorarium” would be paid.
”Koons was extremely enthusiastic from the beginning and I suspect that it’s got something to do with the fact that he is married to a South African,” Barritt added.
This will be Koons’s second visit to South Africa. In 2003 he travelled with his wife Justine Wheeler-Koons to Cape Town, where he delivered a one-off lecture to the Michaelis School of Fine Art.
Reacting to suggestions that Kebble was in good company, given Koons’s love of the vulgar and garish, Barritt said: ”I don’t know how anyone can say that. Brett’s not involved at all. The first he knew we were going to get Koons was when I told him. Brett’s an arts lover, but doesn’t like that work at all. He loves Maggie Laubser and Maude Sumner.”
As far as art goes, then, Kebble is one for safe investments — in fishermen’s cottages and ducks.