AMERICAN ARTIST

Jeff Koons is known as many things: artist, con artist, visionary, revolutionary, prophet, and trickster. It depends on who you ask. But there is no question that the story of Jeff Koons is the story of celebrity, of market making and manipulation, the rise of the hedge fund class, and the meaning of "high art" in today's world. In AMERICAN ARTIST, the first full biography of his life, Linda Yablonsky takes an unprecedented look at the life and work of Jeff Koons, the world's most expensive - and controversial - artist, driven by an insatiable ambition to become the Andy Warhol of his time.

With his two marriages (one to a famous Italian porn star and politician), eight children, bankruptcy, financial salvation, and a posse of jet setting collectors and dealers as friends, the man behind the burnished exterior is anything ordinary. To top it off, his work regularly sells for tens of millions of dollars. Here is an artist who is emblematic of his time and antithetical to it. As reviled as he is admired, Koons never fails to excite conflicted emotions in his legion of viewers. A mix of insider reportage and cultural analysis, as well as an entertaining, sophisticated, deeply researched, and high-stakes drama spanning his entire life and career, this singular biography will beg the question - if this is the art of our time, what does that say about our time?

Linda Yablonsky has been writing about art and artists for nearly thirty years. Her reviews and feature stories have appeared in The New York Times and in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, as well as in Artforum, ArtNews, W, Wallpaper, Elle, Porter, The Art Newspaper and many other publications. From 2004 to 2009 she was senior art critic in the U.S. for Bloomberg News. Linda is internationally known for her art world coverage in Artforum's "Scene and Herd" diary, as well as in her own column, "Artifacts," for T. In 2004, Linda became a founding producer and host of spoken-word programs for WPS1, a streaming arts radio channel for MoMA PS1. From 2001 to 2010, she was a member of the undergraduate faculty of the School of Visual Art.