(Credit: Tom Ipri)

“I could have made that” is a common criticism you will hear in most contemporary art museums across the world if you prick up your ears whilst strutting the marbled floors of the galleries. Indeed, when you look at such works as Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, which is essentially just a banana duct-taped to a white wall, or Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog, it’s certainly difficult to argue otherwise.

Of course, to say that anyone could have made a piece of contemporary art that has had countless hours of thought behind its creation is a little insulting and quite simply false, especially when it comes to Koons’ work, which clearly has inspired artistry behind its inflatable nature. Obsessed with items and objects that can be inflated, Koons has played with everything from large swimming pool toys to basketballs, but nothing compares to when he put together Balloon Dog for the first time back in the late 1990s.

A mammoth recreation of those small balloon dogs a clown at the school fete would have created for you back in the day, Koons’ creations are hollow, stainless steel behemoths that are painted in an array of funky colours. Whilst they may attract the attention of eager children across the world, parents may be put off the idea of purchasing the sculpture for their back gardens when they hear the eye-watering price point of $58.40 million.

Selling at an auction at Christie’s New York, the orange Balloon Dog broke the record in 2013 for the most expensive piece of art ever to be sold at auction, holding the title for five years. This was until Koons’ Rabbit was sold for $91.1million at Christie’s in 2019, with the American art dealer Robert Mnuchin picking up the piece.

Attempting to ascribe some meaning to the ultimately meaningless piece of postmodern art, Koon stated in an interview from 2014: “I’ve always enjoyed balloon animals or inflatables because they’re like us. We are breathing machines. You take a breath, and you inhale, it’s optimism. You exhale, and it’s kind of a symbol of death…The Balloon Dog is eternally optimistic, it’s in a position to stand up to time, its materialism, and its monumentality”.

Despite giving meaning to the piece, Koons maintains that the dogs mean very little at all, being conjured from the joy and celebration of his own childhood.

When it comes to exactly why Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog is so horribly expensive, there is no straightforward answer. His work, much like any other contemporary artist, such as KAWS, is simply expensive for being expensive, with his pieces becoming status symbols for buyers with more money than sense who wish to have a totem to their own financial superiority in their own home.

With a background as a Wall Street commodities trader, Koons has long known how to play the field of the art world, purposefully creating provocative pieces of art in the early 1990s to turn heads. Just like much modern art, Koons’ Balloon Dog is yet another example of contemporary society’s obsession with sparkly spectacle, wealth, fame and the desire for public superiority.