The bankers’ darling

This week’s Imagine… Jeff Koons: Diary of a Seducer (BBC1, Tuesday) began with Koons telling a slightly puzzled-looking Alan Yentob that what spinach was to Popeye, so art is to the rest of us: a way of achieving transcendence and appreciating ‘the vastness of life’. As it turned out, though, not all the claims made in the programme were quite so straightforward. Later, for example, Koons argued that ‘the only thing you really have in life is your interests and when you focus on them it takes you to a connecting place where time really kind of bends’. And even that was possibly beaten by the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch’s analysis of Koons’s early pieces featuring ready-made Hoovers: pieces in which, Deitch declared, ‘the vacuum cleaner becomes this symbol for human life’ — as far as I could work out from his explanation, because it sucks air in and is often attached to a mother.

The programme was based around a huge globetrotting Koons retrospective that’s now reached the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Showing a grateful Yentob around the exhibition, the man himself gave his usual polished performance, in which it wasn’t always easy to distinguish lofty aesthetic ideas from salesman’s patter — reminding us that when Koons came to New York, he worked first at the Museum of Modern Art and then as a commodity broker on Wall Street.

Yet, while Yentob did acknowledge Koons’s status as ‘the bankers’ darling’ — and did show us the Manhattan studio where his concepts are turned into artworks by more than a hundred assistants — the wider cultural and financial implications of his career were never the programme’s main focus. Nor was Koons’s biography, although we did get useful accounts of his childhood in suburban Pennsylvania and of his time in Chicago’s midget bars and strip clubs with his mentor Ed Paschke.