From the Tate website:

‘Bourgeois Bust’ was originally created for the ‘Made in Heaven’ exhibition, in which Jeff Koons explored the concept of love in relation to his own marriage to porn star Ilona Staller. Represented as a marble portrait bust, the couple are depicted within a traditional Baroque style that drew its inspiration from antique classical sculpture. With her plaited hair and string of pearls, Staller appears like Venus, the Greek goddess of love. Declaring sensationally “We’ve become God”, their spiritual and physical union seemingly elevates the pair to a higher realm of idealised existence and ecstasy.

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Jeff Koons

Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona, 1991

According to one of my art history profs, this was the first painting of an erection shown in a gallery. Wieland painted this after her divorce to husband and fellow artist Micheal Snow. The male angel is swallowing a phoenix, showing her cynicism about the dominance men have over women in the arts and her hoof is a reference to the idea of women as domestic animals.

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Joyce Wieland

Artist on Fire, 1983

This is the work that transformed my view of Hirst when I saw it in the Pop Life exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada. It filled me with gleeful joy as it fulfilled my girlhood dreams of finally seeing a “real” unicorn and yet it simultaneously made me really sad as reality set in; its a dead foal in a tank with some gold foil tacked to it. These two feelings created some kind of eerie sublime effect that I found really moving and beautiful. I am not sure of Hirst’s intentions but to me, it kind of symbolized the death of childhood. Pictures really do not do it justice.

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Damien Hirst

The Child’s Dream, 2008

I really like it when artists “cover” each others paintings. Here is what Lichtenstein had to say about his work:

“I’ve cleaned his room up a little bit for him; and he’ll be very happy… I’ve straightened his shirts and bought some new furniture… This is the only interior I have done from another painting. I think the contrast between my intention and Van Gogh’s is so enormous that there is humor in that difference. My principal interest is the extreme difference in style. Where the Van Gogh is so emotional, and feverish, and spontaneous, my work is planned and premeditated, and painfully worked out. To translate an artist’s work into a cartoon style says something. It seems to degrade the work by associating it with cheap reproduction style. But from my point of view I am translating the Van Gogh into my style, which imitates cheap reproduction. I think the process is not so far from Picasso’s translations of Velásquez, which at the time they were done must have been seen as debasing the master.”

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Vincent Van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles, 1888

Roy Lichtenstein, Bedroom at Arles, 1992

(Source: )

Sometimes you want grand serious art and other times you just want to see an artist make a giant cake and put it on the floor. It is for this simple reason why Claes Oldenburg has a special place in my heart, he reminds me that art can simply just be fun, minus pretension.

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Claes Oldenburg

Floor Cake, 1962