WORK
Balloon Dog (Koons)
Jeff Koons's mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture — sold for $58.4 million in 2013 — invoked by Groys as the paradigmatic artifact of the aesthetics of smoothness and the visual correlate of AI's polished output.
Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie's in November 2013 for $58.4 million, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist ever auctioned. The sculpture is ten feet tall, cast in mirror-polished stainless steel, and presents a surface of such aggressive perfection that it seems less manufactured than conjured. There is no seam where the mold closed. There is no mark where a tool touched the material. There is no evidence of human hands, human decisions, human error. The surface is so flawless that it functions as a mirror, reflecting the viewer back to herself in distorted, gleaming, candy-colored form. For Groys, the Balloon Dog is the apotheosis of a cultural logic that now defines the aesthetic landscape of artificial intelligence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Balloon Dog is not beautiful in any traditional sense. It is overwhelming. It achieves its effect not through the presence of something extraordinary but through the