Koons | Willendorf

Seven Ways of Considering a Champagne Cozy

By DIADEM Staff

This week Los Angeles-based Wally’s, a retailer occupying The Sharper Image niche amidst American fine wine merchants, mailed holiday gift catalogs. Blared across the matte black cover, in an image as crisp and color-matched as any Christie’s auction notice, is a new table top sculpture—The Balloon Venus—by Jeff Koons.

According to the fine print, the foremost American sculptor not making curving steel curtains using roustabouts and mothballed shipyards created this homage to the Venus of Willendorf as a project to promote Dom Perignon champagne.

Here are seven ways of considering Koons on Willendorf.

1. The collector who just paid $58,405,000 for Koons’ Balloon Dog (Orange) at auction is saying ‘You gotta be $#^$&$% kidding me!’
2. Every last staffer at the Fondation Beyeler booth in Miami is saying ‘You gotta be $#^$&$% kidding me!’
3. In relation to the Koons oeuvre and recent art tie-ins with luxury products, The Balloon Venus is good sculpture. Good enough, in fact, that the mind wanders into asking how the Koons legacy would be different if, for the past 25 years, the artist had applied his innovation of the inflating, polished, tinctured aluminum skin to Pop interpretations of the searching questions behind Leda and the Swan, The Rape of Europa, or indeed, the Venus of Willendorf.
4. The pink color in Koons’ new sculpture is the same pink that mountain bike disc brakes come in. That’s also the same pink that Koons’ balloon dogs and balloon hearts come in.
5. Somewhere a hedge funder’s practical-minded spouse is saying, ‘Look, for $199.99, you get a Koons gift box and a bottle of Dom.’ To which the MOTU replies, “I’ll spend more than that on the eyedropper I use to serve Michter’s.’
6. If Koons follows up with a Chatsworth- sized Venus, people will worship it.
7. The centerfold of the Wally’s catalog is confusing. Between two detail shots of the new sculpture there lays an image of a similar—the same? or different than? the sculpture, one can’t quite tell—Venus-like shape with a champagne bottle sticking into or out from it. Track the image down if you are researching the, um, intercourse between art and consumptive commerce.

N.1. This text courtesy of DIADEM by Cavendish Projects

N.2. All copyright to text reserved by Cavendish Projects

N.3. Cavendish Projects is on Twitter @cavprojects