Now Anybody With Enough Money Can Put Their Crap on the Moon
The biggest fraud in the art world proves that the right amount of money can buy you anything.
In what was an extraordinary advertising coup for Elon Musk, on February 6, 2018, the billionaire business magnate launched a red Tesla roadster (Tesla is his company) carrying a dummy wearing a SpaceX astronaut suit (SpaceX is his company) into the cosmos (which he obviously feels must belong to him).
As of this writing, the roadster is hurtling 228,776,819 miles from earth. The words “Don’t Panic” are emblazoned on the dashboard, a sly reference to Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A 5-D quartz laser storage device contains Isaac Asimov’s Foundation book trilogy, just in case the roadster is intercepted by any intergalactic travelers who care to parse the English language. And the in-car sound system, silent now that the battery has gone dead, used to play David Bowie’s Space Oddity on a loop.
Contrary to about 98% of Americans who celebrated Musk’s cheeky skylarking, I was appalled. Experts expressed concern over bacteriological contamination and the risk of adding to an ever-growing amount of space debris, but their “Chicken Little” vaporings were impatiently pish-pished by other experts in the field, specifically at Purdue University. Purdue University engineers happen to be on Musk’s payroll, building vehicles for another of his pet projects, Hyperloop.
Are we supposed to believe that anything coming out of their mouths is remotely credible or trustworthy?
What I find so horrifying about Musk’s roadster revel is the hubris. What gives him the right to launch a corporate anything into space, let alone a gimmicky publicity stunt like that one? The minute we start littering up space with the detritus of private enterprise, we’ve opened a can of worms we’ll never close again. Does the USA own space by Divine Right? Did we sign a contract with the rest of the world saying that we could junk it up with our crap?
Imagine if the Japanese had launched a luxury Daihatsu into space with Hello, Kitty at the wheel and Japan’s #1 pop hit, Taiyaki-kun, blaring from the speakers. Here’s a taste of what that might have sounded like. Personally, I’d rather stab myself in the ears with knitting needles. But it gives you an idea of how tone-deaf Musk’s little SpaceX shenanigan appeared to the rest of the world … you know, that place obscenely wealthy men like him can afford to ignore.
Then this morning, the first article that swam across my bleary line of sight was more appalling even than Musk’s ham-handed publicity stunt. I read it twice just to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Jeff Koons, the most expensive living artist on earth, will launch a group of sculptures into space from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, to their permanent home ON THE MOON.
Let me repeat that. Jeff Koons, an American neo-pop artist, is putting his crappy overrated sculptures ON THE MOON. And I’m here to ask the question we should all be asking, which is: what gives him the right?
Overall, it’s been a week of obscenely wealthy men doing appalling privileged things, whether belting a man on the chin and then refusing to apologize, to Russian president Vladimir Putin lying about his nation’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, and now Koons blithely staking his claim to earth’s only natural satellite.
Let me give you a little backstory on Jeff Koons so you can see for yourself what a swell guy he is. I’ll start by saying that he is a poster child for late-stage capitalism; proof that an oh-so-dodgy art world run amok with money launderers is “an economy that works.”
Koons emerged in the 1980s with pieces like these—everyday objects suspended in a Plexiglas case full of water or cheap tasteless statuary you might pick up at a flea market and give to someone as a joke. He took all the charm out of kitsch, rendered it pointless, and then had the audacity to charge millions of dollars for it. Rich folk were willing to pay because they could give f*ck-all about art. For them, it’s an investment.
His most famous piece, a stainless-steel sculpture, Balloon Dog (Orange) sold for $58.4 million. It was the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction. What’s especially galling is that Koons doesn’t even make his own art. Instead, he pays starving art students $22.00 an hour to do his work for him while he and former bestie/gallery owner/kingmaker Larry Gagosian think up fun new ways to avoid paying taxes.
Back in 1991, Koons was married to Hungarian-born former porn star and Italian Parliamentary member Ilona Staller aka Cicciolina. That ended on a storm of bitter accusations and custody battles, surprise surprise. But he did get some valuable publicity out of it. Koons loves that.
His giant topiary “Puppy,” installed outside the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997, prompted Basque terrorists posing as florists to arrange bomb-laden flowerpots around it. Unfortunately, they were busted by two Spanish policemen, one of whom lost his life. My only regret (aside from the tragic and unnecessary death) is that the terrorists never got to finish what they started.
The world’s most expensive living artist is with a new gallery now, Pace Versos. Together, they are orchestrating Koons’ first-ever NFT project, called Moon Phases. A host of thermally coated cubes measuring six inches on all sides will be placed on the surface of the moon—the moon, for God’s sake—in a 1,600 mile region of its north-south axis known as the Oceanus Procellarum.
Meanwhile, back on earth, a scant handful of NFTs (non-fungible tokens, the art world’s new darling and now the easiest way to launder dirty cash) will be offered to private investors. Each NFT will correspond to a specific sculpture. You know the people who buy these kinds of things. Bolivian drug lords. Putin’s buddies. Old “friends” of Adnan Khashoggi. Perhaps a hedge fund manager or two.
“I can see my whole history as an artist,” Koons says. “I can look at this project and I can see the ideas that I had from the very beginning. Now it’s becoming universal, it’s even being outside the realm of the global.”
The last time I checked, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, drafted by the United Nations, specifically states that space belongs to no one country. “The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies,” it reads, “shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic and scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.”
But that was the sixties, right? Benefit, schmenefit. Like all obscenely wealthy grifters, Jeff Koons thinks he owns the world. And he does! They all do. We let them get away with it because we’re too busy recovering from our cancer surgeries or working a second or even third job just to make ends meet. We let them get away with it because, quite frankly, we’re too tired to do anything about it. We’re done.
And yet, every time we look up at the moon in all her beautiful mystery, we will remember there’s a nest of thermally coated cubes with little pieces of Jeff Koons in them. And they’ll be up there for eternity, which is longer than I can say Musk’s roadster will last.
Rich degenerates. We venerate them because we want to be them. They exist to give us hope that one day we’ll be just as rich as they are.
I remind myself of the words of British-American labor union leader Samuel Gompers: “The man who has millions will want everything he can lay his hands on.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to express them in the comments section below.
One of the most confounding (to me) battles I've ever waged with my beloved partner was when we disagreed on the merits of Jeff Bezos launching celebrities, gazillionaires and other self-centered morons into sub-orbital space. Hubs maintained that it popularized the notion of space travel and "you, of all people, should appreciate that." I had to explain in measured terms (and breathing deeply), that, first, "you, of all people" were fighting words and, second, the popularization of space travel was the last thing the world needed for many reasons—far too many to enumerate here. Bezos, I argued, was turning an incredibly dangerous and astronomically expensive scientific effort into an amusement park ride. And that the public should never assume space flight to be safe flight, nor anything remotely akin to commercial aviation. I failed in making him understand why I found Bezos' Blue Origin sub-orbital flights ludicrous and offensive, and Musk's SpaceX enterprise a little less so only because Musk was actually fulfilling the terms of a hard-won NASA contract for crew rotation and cargo resupply to the International Space Station which is, by design, a low Earth-orbiting laboratory. Then there's Musk's Tesla stunt that I, too, find horrifying. If the impact of a micrometeoroid can cause such damage that ISS crew are forced to shelter in an area of the station in case they need to abandon ship, so to speak, imagine what running into a car up there might do! After all, the ISS is moving at 17,500 mph (28,000 km/hr), completing an orbit every 90 minutes.
Then there's the idea of Jeff Koons launching anything off Pad 39A, much less an expression of his so-called artistic vision (and I use that term loosely). There's the commercialization of space exploration, which I accept as an economic necessity. But I reject, strenuously, the bastardization of space, just as I reject the militarization of it. In exploration, there is discovery which, to my mind, is a honorable and beautiful endeavor. What Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Koons and others of their ilk are doing is taking the ugliest part of the human spirit to unparalleled heights.
Oh, actually appropriate here: Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, discusses virtue and its context sensitivity. This is actually one of the most amazing parts about that book, since he is outright dismissing the idea of an absolute Good or an absolute Bad. One of Aristotle's examples is the athlete Milo -- evidently a real person, and evidently one seriously Mongo bruiser. Well the diet that is appropriate to Milo would be hideously inappropriate to the beginning, training athlete. (Adding some color to the historical record, Milo could evidently eat an entire cow at a single sitting, scarcely chewing before he swallowed. Me, I get seriously slowed down by a half-pound burger.)
Well, along these same lines, the virtues appropriate to ordinary people are different from those appropriate to the very wealthy. Ordinary folks ought to be generous (neither profligate nor stingy.) But the wealthy, by virtue of their wealth, have a much greater burden to bear. Their comparable virtue to generosity is Magnificence. But this is not a matter of personal display. This is a contribution to the entire community. The temple of Athena on the Acropolis (indeed, the entire hill) is an example of magnificence. Built by the wealthy, it was nevertheless a contribution to the entire city.
There is nothing magnificent in our wealthy. Everything they do is for narrowly conceived ends of personal glory that contributes nothing to the community. Even Gates and his foundation, when you look at how it actually functions, it strangles any possibility of creative work in order to advance just and only Gates' (monumentally uneducated) vision of how things ought to be.