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Thursday 6 February

Jeff Koons: The Triumph of Shimmering Emptiness

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs who think you know everything about contemporary art. Today, we’re going to talk about Jeff Koons (born in 1955), that marketing genius turned artist—or is it the other way around?

Let’s start with the first defining characteristic of his work: the absolute commodification of art. Koons is the spiritual heir to Warhol, but more cynical, more calculating. A former Wall Street trader, he fully understood that in our spectacle-driven society, as Guy Debord might have put it, it’s not the object that matters, but its representation. And what better representation than kitsch elevated to art?

Take Balloon Dog, for example. This monumental sculpture in mirror-polished stainless steel, sold for the modest sum of $58.4 million, is nothing more than a giant fairground balloon. But here lies Koons’ perverse genius: by transforming this trivial object into a monumental work of art, he doesn’t just play with the codes of art—he completely perverts them. Walter Benjamin spoke of the aura of a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Koons, on the other hand, creates an artificial aura around objects that never had one.

The second characteristic of his work is his obsessive relationship with technical perfection. Each piece is produced with near-industrial precision in his studios, where dozens of assistants work like modern-day monk scribes. This pursuit of perfection is not unlike Renaissance workshops, but whereas Verrocchio trained his apprentices to become masters (just ask Leonardo da Vinci), Koons turns his assistants into mere executors of a vision he doesn’t even bother to materialize himself.

Take Rabbit (1986), sold for $91.1 million in 2019—a record for a living artist, narrowly beating David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). This stainless steel sculpture, a replica of a cheap inflatable rabbit, has become the emblem of his art. Why? Because it perfectly embodies what Roland Barthes called modern “mythology”: an everyday object transformed into an icon, stripped of its original meaning to become a pure symbol. Koons’ rabbit is no longer a child’s toy; it’s a totem of late capitalism.

This alchemical transformation of the banal into the extraordinary brings us to the third characteristic of his work: his complex relationship with popular culture. Unlike his Pop Art predecessors who used mass culture as raw material to critique it (think of Roy Lichtenstein), Koons embraces it without apparent critical distance. He doesn’t condemn consumer society; he celebrates it with near-religious fervor.

His Banality series is particularly revealing in this regard. When he created Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), a gilded porcelain sculpture depicting the pop star with his chimpanzee, he didn’t just document a cultural icon—he actively contributed to its mythification. This is what Jean Baudrillard would have called a “simulacrum”: a copy without an original, a representation that becomes more real than what it represents.

Koons’ choice of materials is never innocent. The mirror-polished stainless steel of his most famous sculptures creates a reflective effect that forces viewers to see themselves in the work. This narcissistic interaction is perfectly calculated: in a society obsessed with self-image, what could be more seductive than an artwork that literally reflects us?

His Celebration series, started in 1994, pushes this logic to its extreme. The Balloon Dog, Hanging Heart, Diamond—all these monumental sculptures are perfectly calibrated objects of desire for our Instagram and selfie age. They are instantly recognizable and spectacular enough to generate a constant stream of photos on social media. This is what Guy Debord didn’t foresee in his essay The Society of the Spectacle: art becoming not only a spectacle but also an infinite generator of secondary spectacles.

But it is perhaps in his Antiquity series that Koons best reveals his perverse genius. By juxtaposing reproductions of classical works with contemporary objects, he doesn’t just play with art history—he cannibalizes it. When he places a reflective blue ball on a perfect copy of the Belvedere Torso, he’s not paying homage to antiquity; he’s turning it into an accessory for his own spectacle.

The paradox of Koons is that he is both completely sincere and profoundly cynical. When he claims to “eliminate guilt and shame” through his art, we might believe him. But this seemingly noble mission hides a more disturbing reality: by eliminating any critical distance, by transforming art into pure entertainment, he actively contributes to the destruction of what makes the artistic experience unique.

The boundary between art and commerce no longer exists. But unlike Marcel Duchamp, who used readymades to question the very nature of art, Koons uses everyday objects to create icons of consumer society. This is what Theodor Adorno would have called the perfect embodiment of the culture industry.

The controversy surrounding his Bouquet of Tulips, offered to France as a tribute to the victims of the 2015 terrorist attacks, perfectly illustrates the contradictions in his art. This giant hand holding colorful balloon tulips, meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty, was criticized as a cynical act of self-promotion. But isn’t that precisely what Koons has been doing since the start of his career? Transforming tragedy into spectacle, mourning into entertainment?

His latest project, Jeff Koons: Moon Phases, which plans to send 125 miniature sculptures to the Moon, pushes this logic to its cosmic extreme. Koons no longer aims to conquer the earthly art market; he literally targets the stars. This is what Friedrich Nietzsche might have called the will to power taken to its most absurd extreme.

The real question may not be whether Koons is a great artist—it’s understanding what his success says about our time. In a world where value is increasingly disconnected from reality, where image trumps substance, where spectacle has become the only reality, Koons is less an artist than a symptom.

His works are perfectly suited to an era where art has become just another financial asset, where museums compete to attract crowds with “Instagrammable” works, where the boundary between culture and entertainment has completely disappeared. In this sense, Koons may be the most honest artist of our time: he doesn’t pretend to transcend the system; he embodies it perfectly.

Because, in the end, what is Koons really telling us with his giant inflatable rabbits, monumental balloon dogs, and smooth, plastic-like Venuses? He tells us that in our postmodern world, the difference between high art and low art, between authentic and fake, between profound and superficial, no longer makes sense. And perhaps that’s the most unsettling part: not that Koons is a charlatan, but that he is the perfect mirror of our time.

As Jean-François Lyotard might have said, we have entered the era of the “postmodern condition,” where the grand narratives that once gave art meaning have collapsed. Koons doesn’t tell a new story—he celebrates this absence of story. His works mean nothing beyond their own spectacle, and that’s precisely what makes them so perfectly contemporary.

In conclusion, Jeff Koons is neither a genius nor a fraud—he is the perfect artist of our time, one who has understood that in a world where everything is a commodity, the best strategy is to embrace this condition rather than fight it. His works are not so much artworks as mirrors—literally and figuratively—in which our narcissistic society contemplates its own reflection with a mix of fascination and horror.

And you, you bunch of snobs, looking down on his works while snapping selfies in front of them—aren’t you the perfect spectators he’s always wanted? Consumers of images who think themselves critics while participating in the spectacle? As Baudrillard might say, welcome to the hyperreality of contemporary art.

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