60 Minutes - 03/10/24: Rise, Jeff Koons, The Last Minute
Episode Date: March 11, 202403/10/24: Rise, Jeff Koons, The Last Minute To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. ...Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.
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Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.
Wherever you get your podcasts.
Meet Nathan Schmidt's camp of climbers.
Their mothers are widows of the war in Ukraine who gambled that a week of challenge
in the Alps could mend their broken hearts. You can't hear the sounds of war here.
You just close your eyes and you feel like you can fly.
I believe the first piece was...
Jeff Koons is one of the most prominent
and polarizing art stars in the world.
His creations may look simple,
but they can take decades to make
and often push the boundaries of technology
and sometimes taste.
Critics may scoff at times,
but that's nothing new.
Jeff Koons has been controversial
since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago.
I'm Leslie Stahl.
I'm Bill Whitaker.
I'm Anderson Cooper.
I'm Sharon Alfonsi.
I'm John Wertheim.
I'm Cecilia Vega.
I'm Scott Pelley.
Those stories and more tonight on a special edition of 60 Minutes.
At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.
But, but, we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing.
Or politics.
Country music.
Hockey.
Sex.
Of bugs.
Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.
And hopefully make you see the world anew.
Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.
Wherever you get your podcasts.
A bus filled with widows of war and their children left Ukraine last August bound for the Austrian Alps.
As we first told you in November, they'd been invited to a charity summer camp
hosted by Nathan Schmidt, an American Marine who knows all too well the bereavement of war.
Mountain climbing was Schmidt's path to recovery from three combat tours in Iraq.
And so, when Vladimir Putin launched his attack on an innocent people, Schmidt offered Ukraine what seemed like an impossible hope.
That in only six days in the Alps, he could teach grieving families to rise.
The journey to an Austrian hotel ended at 3 in the morning after 45 hours on the road.
So the trip already felt like a mistake to widows who packed enough skepticism to last
the week.
Their husbands died defending Ukraine, among the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed.
Time stopped for Natalia Zaremba and her two young boys.
She told us,
I think they still don't believe what happened.
Just like me.
They're still waiting for daddy to come home from work.
For daddy to fly home to eight-year-old Ilya and five-year-old Andre who imagined
mastering the air like their dad. Michailo Zaremba was a navy pilot shot down May 2022 in the unprovoked invasion of his home.
He loved Ukraine, so he gave his life for Ukraine.
What is your hope for this trip?
I want to find strength for myself to be able to bring my children up, to bring our children up.
I want to find the strength to not let my husband down and to give our children a good future.
Thirteen widows and 20 children had come to Austria from Mikolajv meet a stranger still struggling to heal from his own war.
Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Ukraine!
Nathan Schmidt, Naval Academy graduate, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, led shouts
of glory to Ukraine at the third summer camp hosted by his small charity, the Mountain
Seed Foundation.
It comes from the Bible.
It was, you know, with faith the size of a mustard seed, one can move mountains.
We're not a're not religious organization
But that faith that faith in something bigger that faith in self
And if you can reinforce that faith you we and you can move mountains
What do you hope these families have when they return to Ukraine?
We we teach we teach about the significance of the rope in mountaineering.
The rope signifies community, it signifies team.
You're never alone on the rope.
It also signifies courage.
Because when you're on the rope, that means you're climbing a mountain.
And courage doesn't mean that you're not afraid.
It actually means that you are afraid and you're going to overcome that fear.
There would be plenty of fear to overcome
because ultimately this was his goal,
to lead children on the last leg
of a climb to the peak of Mount Kittsteinhorn
at more than 10,000 feet.
The first steps to the summit
began with training for the kids, ages 5 to 17.
For their moms, there were daily group therapy sessions, and every day of the camp would raise
the challenge for both. We're going to trust ourselves, the main thing. We're going to trust
our equipment, and we're going to trust the team that we're with.
The team of professional guides and other volunteers included Dan Knosson. Knosson was
Schmidt's Naval Academy classmate. As a Navy SEAL in 2009, he lost his legs in Afghanistan.
He's a three-time Paralympian,
but he'd never climbed since his injury.
The first days of training looked dangerous.
No, stop! Stop!
But there was always an expert on the rope.
No? Yeah, that's a little late.
One professional guide for every four children
who eased the tension slowly
for kids including 14-year-old Miroslav Kupchenkov.
Now just lean back.
Lean back, totally trust.
No.
Lean back.
I can't.
You can't.
I can't.
You can't. I can't. I can't. You can't.
I can't.
Of course you can.
Miroslav, his adult sister, and their mother, Natalia,
lost Oleksandr Kupchenkov, a 53-year-old career soldier.
Natalia told us,
he was the man I wanted to spend my whole life with.
He was the best at everything.
Wonderful husband, wonderful dad.
People loved him.
Kupchenkov was hit by a Russian missile March 2022
as he was running ammunition to his pinned-down soldiers.
Miroslav told us,
Every day he showed me how to be a good person, and he was always brave.
He would never go back, only forward.
And Miroslav discovered, in repelling, going back is going forward.
And terror was just one step before triumph.
That's it. There you go. Super.
As the children learned the ropes, the moms seemed to be near the end of theirs.
It will be hard for you to hear this.
They were led by clinical psychologist Amit Orin, with translation by Irena Prihochko, the charity's Ukrainian co-founder.
Amit Orin is an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine.
The way I approach this group of people is not in looking at their trauma.
It's in looking at their strengths.
And what strengths are you finding?
Capacity for love.
Honesty.
These are the strengths that they're finding. All I do is take a flashlight,
illuminate inside them, and let them see and remember who they are.
But Svetlana Milinchuk, on the left, didn't see the light. She didn't believe in breakthroughs.
She brought her daughter, Miroslava, while her adult daughter stayed home.
Svetlana lost her husband, Yuri, a civilian building inspector who volunteered the day after Putin invaded.
Svetlana mixed homemade explosives for the troops as her husband sent text messages
from the front. Svetlana told us,
Pictures started coming in. Good morning, darling, with a photo of a flower taken right
from the trench. It was spring already, right from the trench. The photos thrilled her
because Yuri had always worked too much at the expense of the family, she thought.
But after the invasion, family was all he cared about. His revelation lifted their lives.
Then he was dead, and her rage is almost like blindness.
I became very distant and angry, and I kept all the sorrow inside. I didn't share it.
Nathan Schmidt was keeping his sorrow inside when, in 2019, a friend invited him on a climbing trip.
Schmidt wasn't a mountaineer. He's afraid of heights.
To him, the idea sounded so difficult and frightening, it might just have the force to break his grief.
Yeah.
You know, I spent the Naval Academy preparing myself for war,
and nothing can prepare yourself for war.
In 2004, Schmidt was a 24-year-old first lieutenant who dreamed of leading Marines.
He landed in Fallujah on the eve of the bloodiest
battle of the entire Iraq war. Two weeks after arriving at Camp Fallujah, I lost my teacher,
who was a mentor of mine at the Naval Academy. Killed? Yeah. The rocket struck the office. I was the second one in the room, and it was the first time I had ever seen anyone die
in such a way, and it was my teacher.
And that established a crack in me that had to be healed in another way that took years
and years to heal.
The problem was that that was the first of many cracks.
I lost one of our Marines that was in my unit a month later.
I then had my friend lose his leg.
I took over his team.
A few days after that,
I lost my analyst in the gun turret of our vehicle.
By the end of November, the unit that I was with, which is a great unit, 3-1, was combat ineffective.
We had lost over 20% of our unit, either injured or killed.
And that was his first tour.
He fought in Iraq for three years.
Who were you after that third tour?
I thought in my mind that I was the strongest.
But in reality, I was the weakest.
I was strong physically.
I could do as many pull-ups as you asked me to do. I was strong physically.
I could do as many pull-ups as you asked me to do.
I could run.
But I was broke.
And, you know, those cracks, they take a lifetime to heal.
You spend this week doing what you can
to heal these families.
And I wonder how much of that is healing you. It's huge.
This program has healed me in ways I can't even describe.
And I feel sometimes I get selfish.
But you're right.
You're right.
It works. And I'm not sure why. you're right it works
and I'm not sure why
maybe it works
because the children
and mothers
who arrived on the bus
will not be the same people
who return to Ukraine
no one's quite the same
after scaling a wall
like this when we come, teaching the bereaved
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Nathan Schmidt's week-long summer camp for bereaved Ukrainian children and their mothers
began with training in the Austrian Alps.
Then, serious work began.
The kind of challenge that might rise to a revelation.
The Hohe Tawan National Park embraces some of the highest peaks in the Austrian Alps and a feat of engineering.
The Muserboden Dam would be the first big challenge for the 13 widows and their 20 children.
A zip line flew them to the concrete face,
where they found a steel cable
to clip their harnesses to.
Footholds were set across the span
about two and a half football fields wide.
The children and moms literally could not fall,
and yet the Muserboden Dam
remained 32 stories of doubt.
Natalia Zaremba did not like the measure of it.
The Russians had killed her husband, the father of her two boys.
Was this risk foolish?
Why do you put them on this dam?
We put them on this dam because we want them to confront discomfort.
We want them to confront their fears.
Nathan Schmidt co-founded the Mountain Seed Foundation charity.
We met in the 700-square-mile park where the dam, finished after World War II,
is a tourist attraction for rock climbers.
What makes this safe in your view?
First off, we have professional mountain guides.
The second thing is all the equipment that we have.
They train throughout the week on it.
They know how to use the equipment.
And then, particularly the little children, they are also short-roped into a guide.
So there's multiple layers of security for them.
And so, with all that security,
the challenge was not so much under their feet as under their skin.
And here we go. under their feet as under their skin. Help me.
Yep, and here we go.
Miroslav Kukchenkov, who told us his late father
never went back, always forward,
was following his father's lead.
You know, in life, sometimes the thing that gets you
through a difficult point is knowing that you've already
done something more difficult.
What difference do you see in them when they reach the top?
The sheer look of joy on their faces.
Duh! Perfect. Ah! joy on their faces.
It's hard to even comprehend, and we know that that will be a strong point for them
when they go back to Ukraine.
They will know that they've conquered this wall, and they've conquered their own fears. Fears conquered by Natalia Zaremba,
who at the end of the climb was walking on air.
Yeah!
She told us she came to Austria to find strength
to raise her boys alone.
Nice!
She said, it was something incredible. raise her boys alone. Nice!
She said, it was something incredible.
As soon as I stepped on the ground, the children ran to me, hugged me.
There were no flowers there, so my older son gave me a branch from a bush.
You know, I see you smiling, and I suspect there hasn't been a lot of that.
I don't feel joy the way I used to.
Wherever I am, no matter how good a time I'm having,
it's hard knowing my husband could have been with us, but he's not.
And even when I smile, the pain in my heart is very strong.
The pain is strong, but maybe not invincible.
Natalia was listening at the meetings, and words of inspiration, like those of Navy SEAL Dan Kanasin, were getting through.
That bomb in Afghanistan took my legs, and I can't change that fact.
But ultimately, it has to be up to me to decide if it's going to take the rest of my life, too.
Thank you all very much.
Still, for others, especially Svetlana Malenchuk, words fell short.
She had told us her husband sent photos of flowers from his trench until the Russians killed him.
She said,
Life is a book that you read your whole life.
When my husband died, I stopped turning the pages in the book.
But opening a new chapter is what clinical psychologist Amit Oran had in mind.
And so she took the widows to a storybook castle
where she hoped to scale the walls of Svetlana Malenchuk.
And I started to talk with her about castle walls, that we're going to see a castle where
there are always very deep, tough, impenetrable walls, and that I thought that her face looked
like that, that it was hard to see what's inside, like this castle.
And I brought them to a wall, a side wall of the castle
where there are teeny tiny windows.
And I said to them,
right now I think you're here at the bottom.
And as you go up, you're able then to see three windows.
I said, unless you open that window,
you can't peer out and see the beauty around you.
You're trapped.
And ultimately what happened is several of the women
stood there on the grass and opened up to each other.
She was one of them.
It was choking you. It was of them. It was choking you.
It was choking you.
The next day, after the group session,
Svetlana had been thinking.
She came up to me and said to me, it was a very painful conversation we had,
and I made a decision.
My anger was choking me, We had a very painful conversation, and I made a decision.
My anger was choking me, and I decided to let it go so I can breathe.
Congratulations. You've done hard work.
I'm so happy for you. She has a long way to go, but she's understood that it's a choice at least.
The few things she can control in this world
is how open or closed she chooses to be in her own castle.
You know, as you talk to the mothers,
none of them expected what happened in February of 2022.
The invasion.
Losing their homes, in many cases.
Losing their future, or at least their future being unknown.
And it's one of those moments in climbing where you look all around and you don't know where you're going to put your hand.
And you don't know where you're going to put your hand and you don't know where you're going to put your foot.
You don't know if you're going to be able to stay in that position or fall.
This program is meant to show them the footholds and the handholds,
to fill the cracks that they have too,
and then lead their children back up the the mountain on day five one mountain remained
nathan schmidt took the first steps from a high tram station on an ascent to the peak of mount
kittsteinhorn it was a steep and icy 570 feet to the ultimate test of the camp.
Like the dam earlier, there was a fixed cable to hook onto.
But like the dam, glancing down looked fatal,
and looking up, a cold, thin glare exposed hours of struggle.
We followed Schmidt's lead and remembered what he told us about the rope we were on and its three lessons.
Community. Courage.
And the last thing is responsibility.
And this is probably the most difficult one.
And that is when you're on the rope, you're responsible for those that are on the rope with you.
When they're weak, you pull them up.
When they are showing signs of fatigue, you encourage them.
Look at me, Iman. Breathe in.
Two, three, four. Hold.
Two, three, four.
We hope that when they go home, that they build their own communities.
They add people to their rope. That they encourage them to face their fears and have courage.
Courage lifted them 10,508 feet, a summit reached by everyone.
Let's go, Dan!
Including Nathan Schmidt's Naval Academy classmate, Dan Knosson, on his prosthetics.
It was tough, but I'm happy to make it to the top, and it was great to do it with everyone.
Seeing the kids climbing gave me a lot of inspiration to keep pushing.
Natalia Zaremba's kids pushed to the top.
She had come to Austria to find strength within herself.
But from the peak, she could see where that kind of strength truly comes from.
We have something that bonds us more now, some new achievements which we experienced together and that taught us to be
braver and stay together, because only together can we overcome this. Our strength, she said,
will be from being together. Also among the climbers at the summit was Miroslav Kupchenkov,
who told us now he could do anything.
What is your hope for them?
My hope for them is that they can remember the achievement that they've had,
and I also hope they can remember
the stillness and the peace of these mountains.
You can't hear the sounds of war here.
You just close your eyes and you feel like you can fly.
Even Svetlana Malinchuk took flight,
rising to the summit and, at last,
to the high, open windows of her castle.
I was screaming. To be honest, I was simply screaming. Having breathed in full lungs of
air, I was screaming with my head up toward, I don't know, God? Nature? I don't know. I was just getting rid of all the negative.
Has this helped you in some small way to heal?
Oh, well, at least I managed to open the bag of my sorrows. To open their sorrows to the sky.
Five days before, they clipped to a rope a string of broken souls.
Now, they would return to the war, but this time, resurrected in strength and love and invincible hope.
How Dan Canosson climbed Mount Kitschteinhorn without legs.
At 60minutesovertime.com
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Jeff Koons is one of the most prominent and polarizing art stars in the world.
Perhaps you've seen one of his giant balloon dog sculptures.
Or the stainless steel inflatable rabbit he made that resold for $91 million a few years ago.
The highest prize ever paid at auction for work by a living artist.
I bought a much less expensive work of his at a charity auction about 10 years ago.
His creations may look simple, but as we first reported last May, they can take decades to make
and often push the boundaries of technology and sometimes taste. Critics may scoff at times,
but that's nothing new. Jeff Koons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago.
You'll find the largest collection of Jeff Koons' work at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.
Visiting it is like showing up at a strange children's party long after the kids have gone to bed.
There's a giant painting of a party hat, a porcelain Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles,
a kind of pop culture pieta.
The Hulk even makes an appearance.
The star attraction,
a 10-foot tall stainless steel balloon dog sculpture.
I believe the first piece was-
Kuhn showed it to us after hours.
We had to make machines to make this work.
They didn't exist.
It may look like it's filled with air, but Balloon Dog weighs more than a ton and took Jeff Kuhn six years to make.
I started with a balloon, and I blew it up. I twisted a balloon dog.
Did you know how to make a balloon dog?
No, I just got a little book, and I saw how you do it, so I twisted it up.
I probably made about 50 of them, and I made a mold of it. And then that was used to make the stainless steel pieces. You know, originally when I made
this piece, I thought that I could make it for about $300,000, which still that's a lot of money.
But it ended up just to create the piece ended up costing me 1.6. Wow. And that was more than
what I had sold the work for. That's classic Kuhns. He's famous
for going over budget and his obsessive attention to detail is legendary. He spent 20 years figuring
out how to turn this mass of aluminum into a 10-foot tall pile of Play-Doh. To get these
basketballs to appear suspended in air, he enlisted the help of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
And he used more than 60,000 living flowers to create this 40-foot sculpture of a puppy.
Kuhns often takes famous characters or artworks and plays with them, adding a gazing ball to the Mona Lisa.
Or he elevates everyday things, making them larger, shinier, or surreal versions of themselves.
The rabbit's from 86.
86.
Like that rabbit resold a few years ago for $91 million.
He made four that look at first as if they're just plastic inflatables,
but they're highly polished stainless steel and weigh about 150 pounds.
It's iconic because it can represent so many different things.
I can think of Easter, I can think of a politician
with kind of a microphone, somebody making proclamations.
I can think of a Playboy rabbit.
But I think one of the most important things to me,
the reason it's reflective, and reflecting you, reflecting me,
you know, the viewer finishes a work of art.
It's about your feelings, your experiences.
It's about your potential.
Maybe you're thinking Jeff Koons sounds like a phony self-help prophet.
Plenty of critics do.
But he does see art as something that can help people have a personal transformation.
Art can be anything. I mean, it really can be.
My personal experience of art is that you just don't have to bring anything to it other than
yourself. So your message to people is you don't need to have a thesis in art history to interact
with art and what you feel from it is valid? It's as valid as anybody else could experience.
Why balloon dogs?
Why gazing balls, inflatable rabbit?
Memories.
You know, around Easter time, I would see a lot of inflatable
rabbits in the yards.
I would see gazing balls in people's yards,
in their gardens.
Our neighbors who do that, I mean, how generous
they are for us that we're just driving by or walking by and we can look and we can have a
little awe and wonderment just for that second. To me, they're symbols of cultural history.
Coons grew up outside York, Pennsylvania, in a rural community where you can still find
gazing balls in people's yards.
He has eight children, six with his second wife, Justine, to whom he's been married for
22 years.
They still live part-time in Pennsylvania in Koons' grandparents' house, part of an
800-acre farm where they raise horses and cows.
I think most people don't envision that this is
the life you have as a world-famous artist. You know, I'm very involved with my work,
but on the weekends and summers, holidays, it's a really important part of my life.
Kuntz has been drawing and painting since childhood. In 1974, while studying art in college,
his mother helped him meet one of his favorite
surrealist painters. My mother called me and she said, I just saw in a magazine that Salvador Dali
spends half his year in New York City at the St. Regis Hotel. And I thought, oh, okay, maybe,
you know, I'll call. You just thought you'd call him? I called the St. Regis.
I asked for Salvador Dali's room, and they put me through.
You know, I was quite nervous, but I told him I was a fan
and that I would enjoy very much to meet him.
And he said, can you come to New York this weekend on Saturday?
And I said, yes.
He said, be in the lobby at 12 o'clock, and I'll meet you then.
And he was spectacular. It would never have occurred to me to, like, just call Salvador
Dali in his hotel room. I had nothing to lose, you know. Coons and Dali spent the afternoon together,
and at the end of it, he asked the world-renowned artist to pose for this picture.
I remember he put his mustache up, and he was telling me, you know,
kid, hurry up. I can't hold this pose all day. But I left New York that evening feeling like I could
do this. After finishing school, he hitchhiked to New York and started making art in his Lower
East Side apartment, buying cheap plastic inflatables and putting them on mirrors.
Kuhns had grand ambitions, but he needed cash to realize them.
So eventually I became licensed and registered to sell commodities and mutual funds. And so,
you know, that's what I started to do to be able to make more money to make the works. That's not a career move a lot of artists make.
Well, you know, I did it only that I could make enough money to make my vacuum cleaner pieces.
The vacuum cleaners he's talking about were what first got him noticed in 1980.
He bought about 20 brand new vacuums and displayed them in cases with fluorescent lights.
It was part of a series called The New.
I was showing them for their newness, that this was a brand new object. It was part of a series called The New. I was showing them for their newness that this was a brand new object.
It was never used.
You can see that it's clean, it's pristine, its lungs are pure.
And there's also some sensual aspects to it, too.
Sensual aspects?
Sensual. I mean, you have the handle and you have the bag right there.
It could be looked at as masculine.
Or you could look at it and say, oh, you know, the bag is the womb.
Art definitely is in the eye of the beholder.
What did you think of Jeff Koons as an artist when he first sort of came on the scene?
I was interested in him and I also was kind of repulsed by him.
Robert Storr, former dean at the Yale School of Art,
was a curator at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York when it acquired some of Kunze's vacuums in 1996.
I think some of the work is really unpleasant, but it doesn't mean it's not serious.
What's unpleasant about it?
The imagery is vulgar, okay?
Vulgar means many things.
It means of the people rather than of the elites.
So it's taking an object which the New York elites might look at and think, oh, that's
tacky, that's trashy, that's something you buy in a gift shop, and it's blowing it up
and making it perfect and saying that this has value?
It has meaning.
Not necessarily value, but it has meaning.
What is the message of that?
The message is that it is there to be embraced, that it is not to be mocked,
that one should not be smugly sure of one's own taste to the point of denying the possibility of other tastes.
And is he being honest about that?
I think he's being totally honest.
And I think that he has made all of that fair game in a way that we have not seen since Warhol.
Like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons has a factory of sorts, with an assembly line of painters
meticulously following his instructions, and dozens of digital assistants, sculptors, and
craftsmen all over the world helping make his complex pieces, which are often inspired
by very simple things.
This is like a very modern grandmother's closet.
Turns out Kuhns was fascinated by his grandparents' porcelain figurines as a child and has collected hundreds of them.
Where did you find this?
I found it online.
He decided to make this $150 ballerina into a multi-million dollar,
eight-foot-tall marble sculpture.
But it wound up taking him 12 years.
First, he used a CAT scan machine to digitally map
every detail of the figurine inside and out.
Then it took him five years and the help of MIT scientists
to begin translating all those details into instructions
for machines to carve the sculpture.
The actual carving took another seven years.
Now the work will really progress quickly because... We went with Koons to a workshop in Pennsylvania to check on the progress
and found Ayami Aoyama and her team carefully polishing the ballerina by hand.
Do you have a sense of how many hours of work is done on a piece?
33,000 hours.
33,000 hours.
Hours for just the handwork.
It must be exhausting.
I mean, the level of detail and monotony
and difficulty of it is incredible.
Yeah, it is like a really unique job, I would say.
That looks like a sort of a dental tool.
What is this?
Yeah, that's nail polisher that, you know, that lady sucks in.
Really?
Yeah.
You'll notice Jeff Koons isn't doing the sculpting or painting.
He comes up with the ideas and sets the standards,
but his artisans do the labor, which has led to criticism,
including from our own Morley Safer.
So what do you say to the man?
Thirty years ago, Morley did a story critiquing contemporary
art and likened Koons to a P.T. Barnum selling to suckers. He doesn't actually paint or sculpt.
He commissions craftsmen to do that. Or he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners.
Is that a legitimate criticism? It's a legitimate criticism if you look at art in a way that you kind of want everything
to be done by the artists themselves. But it becomes very limited what you can do within one
life if you're being responsible for everything. It's like the production of this program right now.
Anderson, if you had to be responsible for the lighting, if you had to be
responsible for editing... If I was responsible for the lighting, we wouldn't see you or myself.
But if you'd have to be responsible for everything, I mean, how many programs would you be able to
create? I've designed, worked on the systems, so that the whole process, at the end of the day, it's as if every mark was made by myself.
At 68, Kuhns has reached a level of commercial success few artists ever imagined.
He's helped design cars for BMW, an album cover for Lady Gaga, even a superyacht.
And later this year, he hopes to create a permanent art exhibit on the moon.
He's made 125 small stainless steel moon sculptures and mounted them on a lunar lander that'll hitch a ride aboard a SpaceX rocket.
Is there something about the atmosphere on the moon that would affect the lifespan of a work?
Yeah, almost everything.
You know, you have tremendous radiation.
You have the temperature change,
at least 250 degrees difference from night to day. One of the most inhospitable environments that,
you know, you could imagine for a work of art. The moon sculptures are for sale, of course, along with an NFT, or non-fungible token, which serves as digital proof your artwork is actually up there.
You'll also get one of these larger moons to show off here on Earth.
He won't say how much it'll cost you, but with Jeff Koons, it's a safe bet the price tag will be out of this world.
Those smaller sculptures finally made it to the moon about two weeks ago, but it didn't exactly go as planned.
An instrument malfunctioned before touching down, causing the lunar lander to tilt on its side.
But Jeff Koons tells us his sculptures are intact and are now considered to be among the first works of art on the moon. The last minute of 60 Minutes is sponsored by UnitedHealthcare.
There for what matters.
It happens every year near the start of spring
as most Americans make the transition to daylight saving time.
This collective jet lag doesn't save or
stretch or lengthen daylight. It only manipulates our clocks. We can't fool the sun, just ourselves.
We've observed it since World War I, when Congress voted to shift clocks to get more
daylight hours into the workday, both for farmers in their fields and defense workers
in their factories. After a brief break, it returned during World War II.
A couple of years ago, the U.S. Senate voted to make daylight saving time permanent,
banishing standard time forever.
The Sunshine Protection Act failed in the House, but it's been refiled this year.
I'm Anderson Cooper. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes
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