Jeff Koons | Balloon Dog (Blue)

Jeff Koons

Balloon Dog (Blue)

 Los Angeles, USA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995

26 x 26 x 10.8 cm.

Edition of 2300 numbered copies [+50 AP]

Despite being produced in a large edition size and being reissued a few times, this work regularly sells for upwards of ten grand at auction. We had a few at Art Metropole when I was there, selling for between five and eight hundred dollars. 

Toronto audiences weren’t interested, but they sold quickly when we took them to art fairs (Basel, Berlin). 

I’m lukewarm on a lot of Koons’ works, but I’m drawn to the populist pieces like this and the flower dog. 

Puzzles

 

Two Princes

Rulings in two copyright cases this week - both involving visual artists using images of musicians - are sure to have significant implications for artists working with appropriated material. 

The first involved US District Judge Sidney Stein refusing to dismiss two lawsuits against Richard Prince. Photographer Eric McNatt sued Richard Prince in 2016 over his use of a portrait of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, originally commissioned by Paper magazine in 2014. Prince attempted the fair-use defence, which Stein rejected, noting that “the primary image in both works is the photograph itself” and asserting that “Prince has not materially altered the composition, presentation, scale, colour palette, and media.”

The case involving Andy Warhol is both simpler and more complicated. Warhol's work can more easily be viewed as 'transforming' the original, but the primary issue here involves intent. Both the original photograph (taken by Lynn Goldsmith) and Warhol's silkscreen were made to illustrate articles about the musician Prince. Warhol was commissioned by Vanity Fair and Goldsmith was paid $400 to license her original photograph. When Prince died in 2016, Vanity Fair ran a different image from the series in a commemorative issue, paying the Warhol estate ten grand, and Goldsmith nothing. 

Today the US Supreme Court today ruled 7-2 against the Warhol Foundation, overturning a New York federal district judge, who had ruled in favor of Warhol on the grounds that the work was sufficiently transformative and thus fell within the realm of “fair use.” 

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, noted that “Lynn Goldsmith’s original works, like those of other photographers, are entitled to copyright protection, even against famous artists.”

Both artists are significant to the copyright debate. In helping to shape the Pop Art movement, Warhol's use of existing imagery (Campbell's Soup Cans, Brillo Boxes, Mao, Marilyn Monroe, etc.) became some of the most iconic appropriations in the art world. Richard Prince's Untitled (Cowboy), a rephotographing of a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than a million dollars.

In December 2008, photographer Patrick Cariou filed suit against Prince for copyright infringement, in regards to a series of images of Rastafarians that Cariou had taken in Jamaica. In 2011, US District Judge Deborah A. Batts ruled against Prince, finding that the use by Prince was not fair use (his primary defence), and Cariou's issue of liability for copyright infringement was granted in its entirety.

Prince appealed and both the Warhol Foundation and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation filed briefs in the case, siding with the artist and arguing that the intellectual content and aesthetic meaning of works of art are not always visible to the naked eye without art-historical context. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed Judge Batts's ruling, citing a 1992 Jeff Koons ruling (illustrating the importance of precedence in these cases). He stated that Prince's use of the photographs were transformative and thus fair use. 

Subsequently, much of Prince's work has almost seemed pointedly provocative from the standpoint of copyright. These include an entire exhibition of other people's Instagram posts and reprinting JD Salinger's classic 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye in its entirety (see earlier post, here). 

If today's Warhol ruling opens the floodgates of lawsuits, the Warhol Foundation's ability to provide grants to artists and institutions might be seriously hampered. 

Jeff Koons | Balloon Dog (Blue)

Jeff Koons

Balloon Dog (Blue)

Limoges, France: Bernardaud, 2021

40 x 15.4 x 47.9 cm.

Edition of 799 numbered copies [+50 AP]

Published last year and already has an estimated value of between fifteen and twenty-five thousand dollars, making this edition worth almost twenty minute dollars a year after publication. 

Jeff Koons | Puppy Puzzle

Jeff Koons

Puppy puzzle

San Francisco, USA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992

18 x 24"

Edition size unknown

An offset printed 550 piece jigsaw puzzle produced on the occasion of the artist's retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992. The puzzle depicts Puppy, the artist's 1992 public artwork: an enormous West Highland terrier carpeted in vibrant bedding plants. The 38,000 plants, which include begonias, impatiens, marigolds and petunias, are replaced twice a year.

The edition can be found for just over a hundred dollars now, with signed copies (which don't appear uncommon) selling for about eight times the unsigned price. 

Personally, I prefer Koons' populist projects like Puppy over, say, the vacuum cleaner works. 

Artists4Bernie

As of today, more than 2500 artists, curators, critics,  musicians, writers, and arts professionals have formally endorsed Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders for president of the United States. Among them: Hito Steyerl, Jeff Koons, Damián Ortega, Kader Attia, Kara Walker, Kim Gordon, Martha Rosler, Nan Goldin, Anicka Y, Nicole Eisenman, Karen Azoulay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Steve Reinke, Ryan McGinley, Parker Ito and Moyra Davey.

In addition to visual artists, the letter was signed by actress Chloë Sevigny, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and musicians Devendra Banhart, M.I.A, Kim Gordon, and Michael Stipe.

The letter quotes Sanders commitment to the arts: "You have my promise that as president, I will be an arts president. I will continue to advocate strongly for robust funding of the arts in our cities, schools and public spaces. Art is speech. Art is what life is about."Conversely, each of Trump's annual budgets have declared the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities as 'wasteful and unnecessary funding'.

The Artists4Bernie campaign was launched by DIS, Mohammed Salemy, and Jennifer Teets. See the signatures at the website, here:

https://artists4bernie.org

Jeff Koons' Rabbit

The most expensive artwork sold by a living artist is no longer a painting or unique sculpture. It is an edition.

Jeff Koons' three foot tall Rabbit sold for $91 million on Wednesday evening, at Christie's auction house in New York. The work narrowly beat out David Hockney's Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the previous record-holder, which sold for $90.3 million last November.

The 1986 work Rabbit is from an edition of three (plus an artist's proof). Another is in the collection of the Broad Foundation, in Los Angeles, and a third has been promised to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The New York Times reported yesterday that "Art that cost more than $1 million accounted for 40 percent of the market, but just 3 percent of transactions."

Jeff Koons | Balloon Monkey (BLUE)

Jeff Koons
Balloon Monkey (BLUE)
24.9 x 20.9 x 39.2 cm
New York City, USA: Self-published, 2017
Edition of 999 copies [+ 50 AP]


Balloon Monkey (BLUE) is a porcelain, life-sized companion to the oversized stainless steel sculpture of the same name (below). From a series of three that also includes a red rabbit and a yellow swan.

Unlike the similar balloon animals mounted to plates - which sold for a few hundred dollars and quickly skyrocketed in price on the secondary market - these works are being sold for $14,000 US each. At this price, the artist stands the chance to earn almost fourteen million dollars from a single work, if the edition sells out.

This week on Tumblr: Artists' Plates

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/artists%27-plates