Jeff Koons: 'AI is affecting us in the most positive ways imaginable'
The New York based artist talks perfectionism, Plato's Cave, and turning a dog into a watch with Hublot.
Jeff Koons is looking on the bright side. ‘I think we have an amazing future ahead of us,’ says one of the world’s most successful living artists, eyes twinkling. ‘AI is affecting us in the most positive ways imaginable.’
Jeff’s view is not a popular one. It’s a warm September day in New York City, his home, and the morning’s papers are forecasting AI will usher in the end of humanity only years from now. We’re discussing the launch of his latest collaboration, this time with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot.
‘This collaboration lets me celebrate the challenges and opportunities we have with [AI] and to be open to the future,’ he continues, pawing the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, a limited-edition version of Hublot’s sports watch, now physically enhanced by the pneumatic design codes made famous by his shiny, rather ubiquitous 'Balloon Dog' sculptures.
'Being open to everything is how you walk out of Plato’s Cave. If you remove anxiety and fear, you’re able to have higher consciousness'
Unlike the pessimists and, it seems, even some of the billionaire tech bros, Jeff says he’s free of the anxieties of a world overrun by killer robots. ‘I believe in practising the removal of judgement and being open to acceptance of everything,’ he explains. ‘If you practise acceptance, everything’s perfect in its own being, and that’s total empowerment. Judgement creates anxiety, and anxiety creates fear, so you become disengaged, and that creates disempowerment.’
Acceptance, continues the 71-year-old, is fuel for ‘awe and wonderment’. But isn’t judgement a critical part of what makes us human, of what helps us distinguish right from wrong? ‘There are some places for judgement,’ he says, clarifying. ‘You have to make decisions. But being open to everything is how you walk out of Plato’s Cave. If you remove anxiety and fear, you’re able to have higher consciousness.’
Per the allegory, said cave is one we only walk out of with education, and Jeff is eager to impress what he has learned, and what his 'Balloon Dog' sculptures — and his new watch — might teach us. ‘If you think of a balloon animal, the outside membrane is interacting with the external world,’ he begins. ‘If you had a balloon here, you would feel like the inside was vacuous, empty, and the outside world you would feel has more density.
Rabbit, which became the world's most expensive piece of art by a living artist when it was sold in 2019 for $91.1 million.
‘In our own being, we’re like an inflatable, but we’re dense inside,’ he continues. ‘We have blood, organs, and the vacuous part is outside. So when we look at a balloon animal, there’s a reversal, and it gives us a sense of confidence to be engaged in the external world. You feel more safety within your own being.’
The narrative deepens. ‘There’s a profoundness in the dialogue,’ he goes on, still referring to the inside-outside meaning behind his mirror-like stainless steel sculptures of the childhood object. ‘There’s life and death. Take a deep breath and it’s a symbol of optimism and life energy, and then there’s one’s last breath, exhaling, a symbol of death.’
The watch, he says, conveys the same idea, albeit in a slightly more private way than would be true of a towering public sculpture. Every surface of the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons is somehow inflated and cartoonish. Even the dial is undulating, like the inside of a bouncy castle, and the strap is puffy, too. The second-hand counterbalance carries a tiny moulded Balloon Dog, so small it’s barely visible to the naked eye.
‘At death, we deflate,’ Jeff says, without intending to burst his own balloon. ‘But the watch will remain permanently inflated. Time is passing, but optimism is remaining.’
Jeff moved to New York in the late 1970s (initially as a commodities broker) after art school, and has since become one of the world’s most influential artists. His work, which typically elevates the everyday into something more extraordinary, has explored themes such as seduction, banality, consumerism and self-promotion, all of which are as apparent in his first collaboration with Hublot as those that examine our mortality.
'Sometimes I would be referred to as a perfectionist, but I never consider myself a perfectionist, because I’m not'
The Balloon Dog watch comes in 42-millimetres of stainless steel, finished either in a matte metallic red or blue, or a chrome-like finish buffed to mirror levels of sheen. These sit alongside a fourth and far more technical piece, a spin on an esoteric Hublot design called MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons. Sitting a full 2cm off the wrist, its octagonal form is hewn from a single block of sapphire crystal, one of the world’s hardest materials, and houses concentric rings of diamonds and blue sapphires wrapped around a tourbillon mechanism made almost invisible by the translucent blue dome above it.
Even while the MP-14 Origin is large — huge — in wristwatch terms, it’s tiny by comparison to his’ 12-foot-high Balloon Dog (Orange), a piece sold by Christie’s New York for $58.4 million in 2013. Even Rabbit, a 41-inch high stainless steel sculpture that became the world’s most expensive piece sold by a living artist when it went under the hammer for $91.1 million in 2019, would dwarf it.
Image credit: Hublot
The Hublot MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons.
Image credit: Hublot
But scale, Jeff says, is easily surmountable, and collaborations such as this give him room to prove it. ‘Plato would always say that in making a work of art, the first thing you have to deal with is scale,’ he says. ‘If I’m making a traditional piece, I start to make maquettes and cutouts. But it’s all embedded within us, scaled within our mind. And so with pieces like these Hublot watches, I find a major part is internal, profoundly within.’
The detailing in the watches is extreme. Hublot’s production head is in New York, too, and he admits quietly that the dial alone required significant trial and error during the two-year period that spanned the brand’s first meeting with Jeff and the delivery of the new watches.
How does he know when a piece — or a watch — is finished? ‘You take something as far as you can, and then at a certain point you just have to let go, and move on to the next thing,’ he says. In part, this is who he is. ‘Sometimes I would be referred to as a perfectionist, but I never consider myself a perfectionist, because I’m not,’ he offers. And then, with a whisper of irony that makes his eyes light up again, he insists — ‘a perfectionist is like a dog, chasing its tail.’
Hublot Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, £19,700 (all colours)
Hublot MP-14 Origin by Jeff Koons, £383,000
