Adrian Ruth Williams, untitled, 2022

I didn’t know much about Botox in 2002, but there was something strange about Jeff Koons’s face up close. There was a smooth puff to it, a delicate edgelessness that felt off, but not off-brand. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He sat there, relaxed on a three-step stage just a few feet from me. I had a front-row seat, so shamelessly I had permission to stare.

I’d arrived early to snag that spot up front, but as it turned out, I wouldn’t have had to: the free-admission public talk between Jeff Koons and ABC television’s World News Tonight anchor, Peter Jennings, was likely the worst-attended event in Cooper Union’s hallowed history. From the stage of its Great Hall, a not-yet president-elect Abraham Lincoln addressed New Yorkers to rally support for the anti-slavery movement, well before the onset of the Civil War. Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Mark Twain spoke there. John Dewey delivered his 1941 lecture “In Philosophy” in the Great Hall, which has seen lectures, performances, and speeches from Gloria Steinem, Steve Reich, Salman Rushdie, Hugo Chavez, and Barack Obama. When Matthew Barney lectured, it was standing room only. When Arlo Guthrie sang, there was a line out the door. The Great Hall has been – and continues to be – a site of vast historic import. Sometimes people tour the building just to see it. But on that day there couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people, including the staff, spread out in the auditorium, a hall that normally seats 865.

The event was scheduled for 10:30 on a Saturday morning – an unusual time for an artist talk, but likely the only time the news anchor had to spare. Koons arrived early. Jennings walked in late. And so it was clear from the outset whose time had more value.

For those of you who didn’t grow up basking in the glow of US network television in the 1980s and ’90s: Peter Jennings was a white Canadian American, a college dropout, who thrived in the public eye. This middle-aged brunette with a chiseled jawline had a voice so sonorous he could rock a babe to sleep. And he was a diehard performer, the type of renegade journalist who not only flew his own airplane to remote locations to cover breaking stories but one who also strapped on a bulletproof vest to do so. Jennings had unparalleled performance stamina and was renown for having marathon broadcast the first 20 hours of the Gulf War without leaving his anchor desk. He was unrelenting. This was his purpose. Getting the story. Getting the story to us. He spoke calmly. Uncannily calm. There were days Jennings’s face graced the screens of 14 million households. He was seen. The man was legend. [1]

Jennings and Koons were probably paired for no other reason than status. We were in an art school for the distinct purpose of learning more about the artist and his practice. Initiated (and funded) by an institution to highlight the work of an artist, most artist talks are affirmative and elevate the figure and their work by means of confirmation discourse. However, in its dialogical setup, the artist talk can, like other conversation formats, potentially break down (or purport to break down) the hierarchies of the classic artist lecture, presenting the artist impromptu, unscripted, showing themselves in their response. The idea, then, is to coax out the unfiltered thoughts and intentions, to bring the practice and the methodologies of the artist just a little closer to the audience. A relational exercise. In a way, the talk circumvents the monumental talking-head by going straight to the Q and A. But instead of relying on the random, unpredictable questions from the crowd, a specialist is brought in to pose them. This person is generally an expert in the field, an affluential cog of the art system who fuels the conversation’s congeniality with vested curiosity to speak as a medium for everyone else in the room. They are, for better or worse, our voice. But how could a man who conducts presidential debates, a seriously serious political journalist with no track record in the arts bring our questions to Koons? Or maybe the better question is: Why should he?

Jennings ascended the staircase to join Koons on the stage. Assistants attended to the men, checking mics and dusting shoulders. The artist and the anchor were ready. Professionals that they were, they didn’t bemoan the poor attendance. There was no play of disappointment or surprise. At other poorly attended events, I’ve seen hosts acknowledge the absence and even change the format: slide lecture becomes slide conversation. Formal script becomes an off-the-cuff talk. The way events play out become reciprocal. Everyone in the room adjusting themselves in their own way, to the facts of their circumstance. But in the Great Hall there was no invitation to sit closer. No adjustment to the format. No jokes about the time of day. It was as if we didn’t factor in at all, as if they just imagined us away. The men shook hands then took their seats on low-slung chairs. They crossed their legs almost in unison, the dangling foot turned away from the audience, to prevent our seeing the bottoms of their shoes. (Professionals.) Used to the camera, Jennings didn’t need an audience to perform. This was his wheelhouse. He spoke to Koons directly, summarizing his achievements one by one, in the second person, telling the artist and not us where Koons had come from, who he was, and what his work amounted to. Each word from his mouth was indisputable, he confirmed facts chronologically. And achievement by achievement, project by project, the talk flowed on as Jennings’s voice drew a curtain around them on stage that was starting to close them in.

Obviously, Jennings knew the answers to the questions he was asking. He didn’t have to improvise or stop to think. There was no sudden interjection. One line fed the next, seamlessly – they were mileposts on the way to something further. His eyes never left his subject, and Koons, ever smiling, followed suit. Commencing at the scrupulous pace of broadcast television, Jennings wasted no time. Question. Smile. Response. Next question. Smile. Response. They tossed it back and forth for a while, casually, but it didn’t take long to see where this was headed: Jennings wanted to talk about the way everyone else was talking about Koons and sex. He brought up the Made in Heaven series (1989–91), consisting of photos and sculptures that depict Koons and his now-ex-wife (former soft-porn actress turned Italian politician) Ilona Staller in seemingly vanilla sex acts – some were rendered in sculptures made of glass and others were photographs of the pair in various poses, perfectly lit to defy all mystery, against candy-colored backdrops. By 2002, the controversy surrounding the series was already more than a decade old and had long since lost its edge: Was the depiction of penetration porn? Could porn be art? Could art be porn? Could it be shown? Should it be censored? The work had been given enough attention, everyone in the room knew the story. Koons could have entertained the same conversation he’d so often held around this work, but in that moment something shifted. He looked bothered. His smile dimmed; his cheeks went pale.

He didn’t want to talk about it – not about the work per se, but more specifically about what came after. He said that he was ready to move on. The work was salt in the wound that stoked thoughts of his fallout with Staller, a mark that no injectable could nullify. Koons explained that in the years that followed their divorce, he’d made a concerted effort to buy back and destroy all the editions from the Made in Heaven series. His attempt was largely unsuccessful. A caveat of his commercial success was that by undertaking a one-by-one destruction of works from the series, he’d incrementally increased the value of all the unacquired others. Collectors then refused to sell them back. [2] The artist wanted to move on, but the anchor persisted. Jennings knew where he was going, so he led: they’d been married, had a son, then split up, and after the divorce Staller returned to Italy with their child and cut off contact. Koons froze in his chair. Jennings ignored another plea for redirection. This was no artist talk. This was television, untelevised.

Jennings looked at his paper, then back at Koons, holding the line, readying himself to ask the question: When was the last time he’d seen or held his son? The room was quiet. The artist’s lights went out, his eyes glassed over. Koons didn’t have the same discipline as the man across the stage. He couldn’t subdue the pain in his voice. Jennings’s face was unchanged. Unmoved. His hair, perfection. He leaned in, eyes narrowed, asked again. How long? Koons took a breath. He blinked. His shoulders gave in as he fell into the question, thoughts unwinding. It wasn’t his fault. They were stuck in the courts and she was the mother. International law was impossible. You couldn’t beat an Italian politician. Not in Italy. How long? It had been years. [3]

I couldn’t watch and I couldn’t look away. Was Jennings speaking for us, the audience, asking our questions? Did we want to know? Did I? I didn’t want to want to know. I was embarrassed for myself, for Koons, for everyone else in that room. This loss was not our business. Part of me longed to see the artist pay for his success, as if that sort of balance sheet could ever right the scales. But this was different. This pain was not our right to hold. To show intimate material in the form of art is not an open invitation to an artist’s colonoscopy. Unless, of course, that’s the work in question. There is shit which, pending invitation, must remain holy and untouched. How did we get here and who was this show for? Hardly anyone was there. Did that make it any better? Did it make it worse? I remember looking around me, at all the empty chairs. Looking, I suppose, for someone else to be my witness.

The photographer Andrea Robbins, who was on the faculty at Cooper in my time, made a point each year of taking students to attend a live taping of The Maury Povich Show (1991–2022) at the NBC studio uptown to be members of the studio audience. As a photographer whose subjects are primarily people, Robbins thought that by doing so, we might regard the ethics of depiction. At the tabloid talk show, where furniture was sometimes thrown across the stage and the audience was encouraged to get vocal and boo the guests, we art students took our place among the crowd. Without the separation of a screen. Without the power to turn things up, or down, or off, we saw the lives of strangers being pulled apart, talked about, and unprofessionally analyzed. Clapping and nodding wasn’t forced but encouraged as guests were shamed on stage. These were real people with real lives who might have misjudged the magnitude of what they’d taken on. People who now found themselves at the center of the contemporary Colosseum.

From the moment Koons buckled to answer that question, the talk is a blur. My urge to leave was dismissed by the mounting sense that this was, it must be, nearly over. I don’t remember how it ended but I do know how I felt: hollow, guilty, embarrassed, and sad. My attendance to his pain was unjustified. Jennings was a journalist. The story mattered above all else. He did manage to bring us closer to one aspect of the artist, to feel with and for him, to get down to the bottom of something no curator (for good reason) would have ever publicly approached. But the hierarchy he unraveled by bringing television to the stage without the cameras, the relentless probing disregard for what is private, for what is and isn’t ours, makes me wonder what this means for all of us right now, now that the show has become utterly inescapable.

Adrian Ruth Williams is an artist and 2003 Cooper Union alumnae.

Image credit: © Adrian Ruth Williams