The Aesthetics of the Smooth

Artist Jeff Koons summed up our current moment decades ago, with a sculpting series known as Balloon Dog.

Over ten feet tall, cast in mirror-polished stainless steel, perfectly, absolutely, aggressively smooth. Not a single imperfection on its surface. No texture. No grain. No evidence of a human hand having touched it. No seam where the mold closed. No nick where a tool slipped. The things look as though they materialized from nothing, which is precisely the point. An orange Balloon Dog, one of five Koons made, sold for $58.4 million in 2013 and became, for a time, the most expensive work by a living artist ever auctioned.

Of course it did. Balloon Dog is the perfect expression of the dominant aesthetic of our time. The aesthetic of the smooth.

Han's most beautiful argument is about smoothness. It is the one that keeps me awake. The one I cannot quite dismiss. Smoothness. Not the metaphorical smoothness of efficient processes,