Smashing stuff.
My own personal conspiracy theory is that the art-dealer who “accidentally” poked this garish thing onto the floor may have several other pieces of his work stashed safely away.
One less Jeff artwork? Oh no, the value of my collection just increased.
If this happens again (I’m leaving) my new theory may just hold some water.
ETA: That was meant as a general reply, not directed at you, @Kilkrazy
Pooped art:
Ok, so CNN is reporting that the woman didn’t touch it with her hands but kicked the pedestal:
He said the piece fell after an unnamed art collector visiting the booth unintentionally kicked the pedestal during the fair’s opening cocktail hour Thursday evening.
“The collector never intended to break the sculpture, in fact she never touched it with her hands,” he said. “It was the opening cocktail, lots of people were on our booth, she gave unintentionally a little kick in the pedestal, which was enough to cause the sculpture to fall down.”
So, for the want of some dabs of Crazy Glue or embedded rare earth magnets, the sculpture was lost.
These are unsafe times to be a balloon in USA.
What exactly was this made of, anyway? Porcelain? One might have anticipated something metallic or plastic.
Robert Hughes, a man to be trusted with a sharp turn of phrase, described Koons as having:
“the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida”. As a result, wrote Hughes, “you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him. He fits into Bush’s America the way Warhol fitted into Reagan’s. There may be worse things waiting in the wings (never forget that morose observation of Milton’s on the topo-graphy of Hell: “And in the lowest depth, a lower depth”) but for the moment they aren’t apparent, which isn’t to say that they won’t crawl, glistening like Paris Hilton’s lip-gloss, out of some gallery next month. Koons is the perfect product of an art system in which the market controls nearly everything, including much of what gets said about art.”
(ETA fuller quote)
I imagine Chihulys get busted all the time. They kept disappearing from an outdoor exhibit here as I recall. His army of interns and assistants just make replacements.
That sounds ever so limited.
Oh, well. 1 down, 798 to go.
(She’s got her work cut out)
$58 million, 3 meters tall, made of stainless steel
$42,000, 40 centimeters tall, made of porcelain.
There’s no need to duplicate the engineering that goes into a large outdoor sculpture.
Because of the way art glass is cooled (several days to ramp down from 1500F to ambient), they’re far more resilient than you might think. A former employer (who did process heating and temp control for several glass artists, Chihuly included) had a Sonja Blomdahl brimmed vase that a child accidentally knocked off a shelf and it survived a three-foot drop to the floor. If art glass is going to crack or break apart, it usually happens in the annealing process.
That is a hideous description, well done Mr Hughes.
And closing the loop on the vapidness of most modern art, a German MFA student runs into the gallery with an armload of corrugated, unbleached, acid-free cardboard, and organically grown hemp twine and makes a corral around the broken shards.
My wife had the idea of gathering up the shards, putting them in a glass bowl and calling it a new work of art. Sell for way more than $42k.
I’m sure someone already thought of Kintsugi.
Someone also probably thought of attempting Kintsugi and selling the miserably-failed partial attempt as art.
Not a fan, eh! 
Ah! I had heard initially that she tapped it. Thanks for the update!
[ETA] Also… this accident reminds me of this:
With a happy ending!
That’s the best possible end result for a Jeff koons.
I will be her witness that it was worthless in its original condition, as I wouldn’t have paid a dime for it, but now I think it’s worth closer to $100,000 so she should bill them for upgrading its value, and give me a cut for thinking of the idea.
