Jeff Koons’ Rabbit: An Homage to Steel and Metalworking or Vacuous “High-Art”?
Today, I read about how the eclectic Jeff Koons sculpture, the banally-titled and conceived Rabbit, sold for USD 91 million at Christie’s. It set the auction record for “work by a living artist.”
The reporting was from about a month ago, but I really have no reason to keep up with the world of high art, so here I am a month later writing about Rabbit with my fingers clamped up with rage, the dreadful art world having gleefully moved on to other incomprehensible multi-million-dollar shapes.
91 million dollars?
Here is a picture to illustrate my confusion:
Yes, that is Rabbit herself. I bet Jeff Koonz doesn’t believe in gender, but I’m not sure I believe in him, and so I say the rabbit is a she.
There she sits, limbs perked up like she’s waiting to celebrate something, face a shiny, spotless, sphere of blankness — like me, when I had read the headline that she sold for 91 million dollars and my face glassed over and body assumed rigor mortis position.
I’m not sure what a guy like me, a high school teacher from a working class background living in a tiny conjoined house in Hamilton, is supposed to feel about this. I’m not sure what any normal or struggling person is supposed to feel about this. I wonder if these high snobriety types ever think about it when they make their bids: hmm, with 91 million dollars I could surely make a dent in world hunger, but I’m going to buy this faceless rabbit instead.
That said, I’m a historian, and historians don’t make judgments like that (presumably). It’s my job to understand how something like this happens.
So I did some research into Koons. He doesn’t look like your usual artist type, but for all we know, that’s part of the performance. Artists like to be ironic, I’m told, and life is a performance, I’m told.
Let me clarify: there is nothing inherently offensive about Jeff Koons the artist, artists in general, Rabbit, or art in general. What’s offensive is the price tag.
A raving Christie’s write-up about the sculpture and its auction described the piece as “a thumb in the eye of the art world,” and I agree — like many modern and contemporary art pieces, it is so distinctly “not-art” that it becomes the thing it pokes fun at. By merely existing as a contradiction it undertakes an elusive, intellectual meaning, therefore automatically rendering it what every twizzled-mustached, skinny, Tesla-driving, only-dates-teen-models art critic claims is “art.” But then the write-up goes on to say that Rabbit “is a mirror not for princes, but for the public, reflecting us.”
And that’s where I’m lost again. Rabbit is part of a series titled Banality. Yes, banal: as in pedestrian, as in dull, as in common in such a way as to point out a lack of value. Again, this is artists trying to be ironic. Is the public, is “us”, banal?
Coming from Jeff Koons and the art world that’s valued a sculpture of a rabbit at 91 million dollars, all this feels like a slap in the face. What is Rabbit truly reflecting back at us, if she herself is so distant from us? There is nothing of us to be found in her, not in her blankness, her lack of agency, or her price.
Who is “us”? Art critics? Artists? Curators? Or common, everyday, “banal” folk like you and me?
Real banality is dilapidated cities continually decaying from economic disenfranchisement, where our streets are accented not by sculptures and adoring cameras but by the bodies of the homeless and addicted (read: Hamilton).
That said, the art world would 100% slap a price tag on that if Jeff Koons could somehow capture the essence of it all in a sleek, cute statue signalling the death of culture and humanity.
But I’ve raged enough. Perhaps I misunderstand. Perhaps my mind is not open or blessed enough by the gods of privilege and pretension to understand art, much less Jeff Koons’ brand of art. And so, for the sake of my own intellectual diversity, I will attempt to see the other side of things, in the only way I know how: from a historical perspective.
Koons’ Rabbit is made from highly mirror-polished stainless steel, made to imitate the look and material of a balloon. In that regard, it is genius.
The Christie’s article says “crucially, as well as being strong and useful, steel also has the gleam and glimmer of luxury.” Of course, steel polishing technology is relatively new. Steel of old did not used to look as luxurious as it does in Rabbit, but that quality is certainly a selling point of steel today.
Coming from a long line of fabricators in my family, trust me when I say I’ve been around steel. In my last blog I talked about how one tragic event in history virtually kickstarted modern steel production — but of course, there is more to its history than that.
Today, steel fabrication has elevated standards of living, enabling the modern lives we live. But it still isn’t an easy process — and it was even harder back when we lacked the technology.
Metalworkers of old used to labour for days and weeks to produce the smallest objects, though it was always a labour of love.
After all, metalworking is an art just as much as it is an industry. I’m much more willing to see art as a product of hard work and dedication, rather than as a product of idiot-savant tinkering and all the popular kids deciding what art is, especially if we are going to attach a price tag to it. For this reason, I’m much more invested in the idea of fabricators, blacksmiths, metalworkers, steelworkers — you know the deal — as being artists.
Before we continue, a disclaimer: I’m going to use the term metalworker despite the fact that steel is not a metal. I am aware of this.
The ancient history of steel is limited — the earliest known archaeological evidence of steel production was excavated from Kaman-Kalehöyük (modern day Turkey) and is nearly 4,000 years old. Even then, it was found in pieces of ironware, leading to conclusions that the presence of steel here was more so incidental than intentional.
Again, steel is not a metal, but an alloy of iron. For my money, the first legitimate, large-scale producers of steel were the Tamilakam metalworkers, who popularized wootz, or Damascus steel. This was only around the 6th century BCE, which goes to show that steel is a much younger material compared to its metal counterparts, such as copper, which dates back to 8,700 BCE.
Due to the complex and not-yet ubiquitous nature of making steel, it was used sparingly, mostly incorporated into the creation of weapons from what I can tell. It was considered highly valuable: Alexander the Great was once awarded not with gold or silver but with 30 pounds of steel after defeating his enemies.
Certainly, metals have always had great monetary and cultural value attached to them.
As such, metalworking was considered an incredibly necessary and valuable profession. Metalworkers became increasingly skilled at fabricating objects of adornments, trade instruments, weapons, and religious artefacts, among others. They were, unsurprisingly, considered important members of society. But never artists.
In fact, the more widespread steel and metalworking became, the less these workers were considered skilled artisans, even though metalworking is not a job just anyone could do.
As the modern age rolled around and more and more “high art” was produced and displayed, our definition of artists has become rather narrow, in my opinion. The most visible kinds of steel are commonly found in household items and in architecture — at least with architecture, even though it is functional architecture, I still feel like we should acknowledge it as art.
My father was a steel fabricator. I rarely saw him — back then he worked long hours and liked it. One night he brought home a “trinket,” which was what he called it. I don’t have it anymore — I let my sister keep it when she got married, and she’s in Arkansas now. It was made of steel, carefully carved and shaped, a frolicking pony its central subject — unpolished, a little grimy, a little rough.
“Made it for you guys,” he said, and then went upstairs. He was a man of few words.
It actually looks quite similar to the picture I found below, after scouring the internet for a bit:
To 12-year-old me, that was art. To 37-year-old me, it still is.
And so if there are any positives that I can glean from this whole Rabbit thing, is that it’s a reminder that metal, steel, and all these other materials people would otherwise associate with blue collar labour and “function over style” — ugly materials, so to speak — these things can make art too.
And perhaps from that realization will come the follow-up: that the people who work with these materials are also artists in their own way. Do they deserve to be paid 91 million dollars? Frankly, I don’t think anyone does.
