The visitor broke the Jeff Koons sculpture at Art Wynwood
Broken Sculpture of Jeff Koons from a Broken Balloon Dog’s Piece by a Fashioned Art Fair Attendee
The artist Jeff Koons’ famous sculptures might look like they’re made from balloons — but the works are actually fragile, as one art fair attendee found out when she knocked over a $42,000 Koons piece Thursday, causing it to shatter.
In a statement shared with CNN over email, the gallery’s district manager, Cédric Boero, who was managing the Art Wynwood booth, told CNN that the gallery serves as “one of the official representatives for the famous Jeff Koons balloon dogs sculptures.”
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 gallery shared photos of the sculpture reduced to scraps of ceramic lying on the floor. According to the gallery, the pieces are waiting in a box to be evaluated by an insurance expert. Some people have offered to purchase broken pieces from Bel-Air Fine Arts.
The shattered sculpture was worth around 24k dollars a year ago. The price went up as other versions of the sculpture sold out.
He has created hundreds of renditions of the balloon dogs, some of them towering over 10 feet tall, and some of them just over a foot tall, like the sculpture that shattered.
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“I was shocked obviously and a bit sad about it,” Cédric Boero, who was managing the booth that displayed the sculpture, told NPR. “But the lady was obviously very ashamed and she didn’t know how to apologize.”
The sculpture fell to the floor after the art collector knocked it over. The sound of the shattered sculpture instantly stopped all conversation in the space, as everyone turned to look.
“It shattered into a thousand pieces,” an artist who attended the event, Stephen Gamson, posted on Instagram, along with videos of the aftermath. I’ve seen a lot of crazy things.
What are we going to do now? OK, let’s say the gallery actually comes up with a price for these pieces and lets Gamson have them. What is he going to do with a pile of broken blue porcelain?
“We are not happy that it is broken, because we don’t like it,” Boero said. We have insurance because we are part of a famous group of galleries. We will be protected by that.
If we’re being honest, the main character in this story is the woman who bumped into the pedestal holding the Jeff Koons “balloon dog” sculpture, sending it to its death on the floor at a Miami art fair last week.
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We’re not going to reveal her identity because that was probably the most embarrassing moment of her life. The man is trying to pick up pieces. Yeah, literally.
What’s the big deal? The woman who bumped into the table is trying to suppress her memories, which is why she is enjoying the drama. He thinks the piece is worth saving.
