Koons produced five editions of Balloon Dog in different colors — Orange, Blue, Yellow, Magenta, Red — between 1994 and 2000. Each is over ten feet tall, cast in mirror-polished stainless steel. The Orange edition sold for $58.4 million at Christie's in 2013, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction to that point. The sculpture is, on its surface, a joke: the children's party balloon-animal rendered at the scale of monumental public sculpture, in a material that reflects everything and contains nothing. The joke has become, across repeated analyses by Byung-Chul Han, Hal Foster, and others, the canonical visual exhibit of the aesthetic regime that Han names the smooth.
The sculpture is perfectly smooth. There is not a single mark of human contact — no fingerprint, no tool trace, no asymmetry that reveals the hand. It is, in this respect, the terminal expression of the aesthetics of possession that Berger identified in European oil painting.