On Wednesday evening at Christie's in New York, American artist Jeff Koons's 3-foot-tall sculpture Rabbit (1986) sold for just over $91 million, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. $91 million. Ninety-one million dollars. 91 millones de dólares. Jeeeeeeeeesus.
The cold, vacuous sculpture was bought by art dealer Bob Mnuchin (father of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, god) on behalf of a client, Liana Gorman. This $91.1 million price tag edges out a record set last November by David Hockney's Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures) (1972) which fetched $90.3 million.
The stainless steel sculpture is a faceless space bunny, a balloon that's not a balloon. The piece was one of 11 works that were offered from the collection of magazine publisher S.I. Newhouse, the longtime chairman of Condé Nast who died in 2017."The work is considered the holy grail of Koons works among certain collecting circles, and the bunny's allure was burnished by the fact that Newhouse was its longtime owner," Artnet writes. "It also received an extraordinary pre-sale display at Christie's with a custom-built room that perched the rabbit on a pedestal surrounded by lighting mimicking a James Turrell installation."
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The sculpture was cast in 1986 in an edition of just three, plus an artist's proof. The one sold Wednesday was the last one in private hands, with the others in the collections of The Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the National Museum of Qatar.
The excess! The lack of taste! It's infuriating. Damn—I wish Jeff Koons would retire already.
