Balloon Dog (Koons)
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.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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