Jeff Koons’ oversized version of the balloon dog has become so popular that there are numerous inexpensive imitations like this one. With his sculptures, the artist blurs the boundaries between kitsch and art by distorting banal and potentially kitschy everyday objects, refining them and turning them into works of art costing millions.
The term kitsch is mostly used in a pejorative sense to describe sentimental, naive, and superficial things. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, kitsch stood for the bad taste of mass culture as a whole. Together with terms like trash, trinkets, and junk, it tells the story of the devaluation of popular taste. Opposed to this is the idea of high art, which is complex, self-reflexive, and hard to understand. By now, the perception of kitsch in academic, cultural, and social discourse has transformed and become more differentiated. In addition to a re-evaluation of kitsch itself, aesthetic concepts such as camp and trash have since evolved into styles with positive connotations – especially in subcultural contexts and queer communities. Nevertheless, the term remains associated with judgmental attitudes to this day.
This imitation is currently on display in the exhibition “Milieu Things – Of Class and Taste”.
