Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he's the biggest best or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he's the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you're talking about the wonderful wicked lovable and annoying creatures known as art dealers).
Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world its ayatollah deliverer and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk Pop Art Jeff Koons Marcel Duchamp Francis Bacon and Catholicism.
All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture) the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism idealism and fantasy.