Art & Tech
Behold, Jeff Koons’s New Masterpiece: A Squarespace Website Template
Now your website too can look like jeffkoons.com.
There’s a new website Jeff Koons wants you to know about—his own, naturally. It’s called jeffkoons.com and it has been designed in collaboration with Squarespace, the customizable website platform.
Koons knows about presentation and self-promotion, two qualities all aspiring artists are in need of. His new design template is called “Reflect,” referencing both the surface of his balloon sculptures and the more cerebral contemplation that might come with looking at them. Crafted with creatives and aesthetes in mind, it boasts a “bold approach to branding” and helpfully “allows the art to take center-stage without distraction.” It’s now available to all Squarespace customers.
As Koons tells it, he had been frustrated for years by his old website which was proving incapable of properly representing his artwork or his vision. When Squarespace reached out, he was delighted to become the company’s fourth cultural collaborator after Björk, Magnum Photos, and the music producer Rick Rubin. The template, which is available in six languages, “communicates visually, emotionally, and intellectually the way I see the world,” Koons said in a statement.
What this amounts to is organizing the entire Koons universe into a single domain. It is essentially a minimalist black-and-white world with sharp images that glide past pleasurably. Crucially, you can now browse Koons’s entire portfolio across his four decade-long career, from his mirrored inflatables of the late 1980s to Moon Phases (2023), the piece that became the first artwork ever installed on the lunar surface.
The rest of Koons’s artistic practice is catalogued with equal rigor. There’s “Exhibitions,” where you can find a photo of a 25-year-old Koons huddled among fellow artists involved in a Venezuelan exhibition. In “Biography” we can trace every award received, speech given and collection entered. “Bibliography” takes care of the books, monographs, periodicals, and discography (did you know a balloon dog was featured in 2006’s Night at the Museum?) “Shop” does what you would expect, offering a range of prints, skateboards, porcelain balloon animals, and plates from his “Banality” series.
In a sleek promotional video accompanying the release of “Reflect,” Koons sits in his studio and explains the thinking behind the website and the meaning of art. “What makes art, art?” Koons asks. “For me, it’s the power of connections. If we look at our body, our internal being, our D.N.A., everything is interconnected […] the only thing you can hope for is that the viewer can find something that can give them the essence of their own potential.”
With Koons’s work spread across the world, he hoped to make art more accessible through his website. “This type of democratization is really the basis of all art,” he says while tying off a blue balloon dog, “to be able to share and be generous.”