Method Acting: The Artist-Interviewer Conversation

Abstract

Roughly five years ago, on my first day as art editor of Time Out New York, I was assigned to interview Jeff Koons, whose Puppy (1992) was being installed at Rockefeller Center—a significant reentry by the artist into the New York art world, from which he had been generally absent in the decade or so following his harshly criticized Made in Heaven exhibition. Sensing a revealing moment, Time Out slated our conversation to appear as the magazine's Hot Seat, a feature column regularly advertised on the cover and reserved almost exclusively for personalities from music, movies, and television.