Jeff Koons

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Private Collection, California

Thence by descent to the present owner

Olivier Gabet, Bijoux D'Artistes De Calder a Koons. La collection ideale de Diana Venet, Paris 2018, illustrated in color p. 105

E.P. Cutler and Julien Tomasello, Art + Fashion: Collaborations and Connections Between Icons, San Francisco 2015, pp. 112 - 114, illustrated in color

Louisa Guinness, A Decade of Artist's Jewellry, London 2013, pp. 76, 114

"Picasso to Koons: Artist as Jeweler," Artforum, September 2011

Julie Brener, "Art Talk: Those Lips, Those Eyes," ArtNews, December 2005, p. 40

New York, Museum of Art and Design, Picasso to Koons: Artist as Jeweler, September 20, 2011- January

8, 2012

London, Louisa Guinness Gallery, Jewelry Made by Contemporary Artists, 2012 (color ill.)

Jeff Koon’s Rabbit (1986) is not only the defining masterpiece of the artist’s celebrated career but it is also one of the most significant sculptures in the history of art. When Rabbit sold at Christie’s in 2019 for $91 million, it became the most expensive work of art by a living artist, thereby confirming its undisputable cultural significance. Since its creation, Rabbit, which has been endlessly exhibited and theorized, has become one of the essential symbols of contemporary art as well as a kind of totem of our age. There is something perfectly Koonsian about the translation of Rabbit into a necklace, since Koons has, throughout his career, interrogated the relationship between consumer culture and art often by celebrating the everyday objects we are wont to disregard by elevating them to the status of art. For example, in his seminal series, The New, Koons enshrined Hoover and Shelton vacuum cleaners in plexiglass boxes such that they took on a spiritual power, just like the inflatable rabbit does in the current work. However, whereas Koons transformed consumer products into art objects in The New, with Rabbit (Necklace), Koons returns the inflatable to its original status as a consumer good. But for Koons, this line between consumer goods and the realm of art is a faint, and perhaps nonexistent, one. By translating Rabbit into a necklace, Koons emphasizes Rabbit’s divine presence as well as its commodification. The gleaming, platinum rabbit, which suggests a religious pendant, thus becomes the god of our contemporary consumer culture.