Jeff Koons's New York
Jeff Koons is one of those artists New York has a complicated relationship with — he made his name here, his work is lodged all over the city, and New Yorkers can’t quite decide whether to be annoyed or awed by him. His highly polished stainless steel balloon animals, his record-smashing auction prices, his giant floral sculptures in unexpected places: love him or hate him, his fingerprints are all over Manhattan.
1. Balloon Flower (Red) at 7 World Trade Center
7 World Trade Center, Vesey Street between Greenwich and Washington Streets
The most accessible Koons in New York is also one of the best. Tucked into the plaza at the base of 7 World Trade Center — in the shadow of One World Trade — is Balloon Flower (Red), a massive stainless steel sculpture from Koons’ Celebration series. The thing is red, shiny, and unmistakably a balloon animal blown into the shape of a flower. In summer it functions as a fountain, shooting jets of water that commuters and tourists park their feet under on hot days. In winter it reads as a bright, slightly absurd oasis in the windswept transit hub that connects the subway, PATH trains, and ferry terminals.
The piece is formally described as an homage to 9/11 survivors, though its cheerful, candy-colored reflectiveness cuts against any mournful reading. That tension — between the weight of its context and the lightness of its form — is kind of the whole Koons trick in miniature. This is a permanent installation and one of the few places in New York where you can encounter signature Koons work for free, outside, any time you want.
2. Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Plaza, between 49th and 50th Streets
Rockefeller Center has hosted Koons more than once, and the relationship suits him: he likes spectacle, and the plaza below 30 Rock is one of the great stages for it in the city. The most notable installation was Split-Rocker (2014), a towering topiary sculpture — a hybrid pony/dinosaur head covered in flowering plants — that loomed over the famous ice rink. Before the flowers bloomed in, it looked genuinely unnerving, like a massive robot skeleton in the middle of Midtown. Once flowering it became one of those pieces that stopped everyone mid-commute.
The Center’s willingness to host work of this scale and strangeness in one of the most commercially trafficked spaces in the world is itself a statement about how Koons operates — at the intersection of fine art seriousness and pure pop spectacle.
3. The Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District
The Whitney is where New York gave Koons his definitive institutional stamp of approval. The 2014 retrospective — the largest exhibition of his work ever mounted — was also a kind of farewell to the Whitney’s old Marcel Breuer building on the Upper East Side before the museum packed up and moved downtown to its current Renzo Piano building in the Meatpacking District. The timing was perfect: Koons as the last major statement from the old Whitney, a capstone to an era.
The show was massive, spanning his entire career from the early vacuum cleaner pieces through the Banality series, the infamous Made in Heaven works (near-pornographic photographs with his ex-wife, the Italian porn star turned politician La Cicciolina), and the Celebration sculptures. Outside on the street, the artist Jon Burgerman set up a pop-up stall selling hand-made Play-Doh miniatures of the Play-Doh sculpture inside — each one certified authentic, made in about 20 seconds rather than Koons’ 20 years. The Whitney staff, to their credit, apparently found the whole thing funny.
The retrospective is long gone, but the Whitney remains the institution most closely identified with Koons’ New York legacy.
4. Lever House
390 Park Avenue, at 53rd Street
Lever House was one of the first glass curtain-wall skyscrapers to rise on Park Avenue when it opened in 1952 — the headquarters of the Lever Brothers soap company, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and a genuine landmark of Modernist architecture. These days it’s a financial district address, but it’s also home to one of the more quietly interesting public art programs in the city.
The Lever House Art Collection has rotated work through its ground-floor exhibition space and outdoor sculpture program for years, running the full gamut from Barbara Kruger and Keith Haring to Damien Hirst and David LaChapelle. Koons has been part of that roster. The program rotates — it’s not a permanent installation — but the caliber of work shown here rivals what you’d find in any commercial gallery, and the building is a landmark regardless.
5. Christie’s New York
20 Rockefeller Plaza (formerly 49th Street location)
Christie’s is where Koons became the most expensive living artist on the planet. On November 12, 2013, his stainless steel Balloon Dog (Orange) — one of five color variants from his Celebration series, each made between 1994 and 2000 — sold for $58.4 million, blowing past its high estimate by $3.4 million and stripping the record from 81-year-old Gerhard Richter. The seller was collector Peter M. Brant. The same evening sale set a record for Christie’s itself: $692 million of art sold in three hours.
The auction house has shifted locations over the years, but the Rockefeller Center address is where the big evening sales happen. You can’t walk in and see the Balloon Dog — it’s owned by some private collector who probably has a very large house — but standing in the salesroom, or even just on the plaza above it, puts you at the precise geographic point where Koons’ market mythology was made.
6. Upper East Side Residence
11 and 13 East 67th Street
Koons bought two adjacent townhouses on the Upper East Side in late 2010 and combined them into a single 21,500-square-foot residence — at the time, the second-largest private home in New York after the Emir of Qatar’s place. Why the Upper East Side? It’s a reasonable question for an artist whose work feels so emphatically not Upper East Side. One theory: a show of his Made in Heaven photographs — the ones featuring his ex-wife La Cicciolina in explicit poses — was displayed in a townhouse nearby. Whether that was the draw or just a coincidence, Koons chose to plant himself in one of the city’s most conservative neighborhoods.
One of the houses at number 11 was originally owned by Joseph B. Bloomingdale, founder of the department store, who died in 1904. So the building has a very New York history of money, commerce, and reinvention — which, honestly, tracks.
7. Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea
555 West 24th Street (and other Chelsea locations)
Gagosian is Koons’ primary commercial gallery relationship and the place where his major market moves get made. In spring 2013, in a move that was either brilliantly audacious or just audacious, Koons held simultaneous rival shows filling both Gagosian and David Zwirner galleries in Chelsea at the same time — two mega-gallery exhibitions running concurrently from the same artist. It was the kind of stunt only Koons could pull off: the art world talked about little else.
Gagosian’s 24th Street space in Chelsea is a massive, serious gallery that can handle the scale Koons works at. His stainless steel sculptures are large objects, and this is one of the few spaces in New York that can present them without the work feeling cramped. Secondary market works appear here regularly, and the gallery program keeps Koons’ presence active in Chelsea year-round even when he’s not showing new work.
8. Sotheby’s New York
1334 York Avenue, at 72nd Street
Sotheby’s is the other axis of Koons’ auction universe, and worth knowing about as a destination in its own right. The auction house at York Avenue on the Upper East Side holds previews that are essentially free museum-quality exhibitions — works that come up for sale get shown in the galleries for several days before the gavel falls, and the caliber of what passes through here is often extraordinary.
Koons works appear in the major evening sales regularly, and Sotheby’s has also found creative ways to extend his cultural reach — their “Art of Food” events, which pair top New York chefs with artworks as culinary inspiration, have included Koons alongside artists like Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha. It’s a very Koons kind of event: art as sensory spectacle, luxury and accessibility in awkward proximity.
Koons is easy to dismiss — the joke practically writes itself — but New York keeps finding ways to take him seriously, and the city’s engagement with his work is more layered than the auction records suggest. The Balloon Flower at 7 WTC is genuinely affecting in its context. The Whitney retrospective was a genuine reconsideration. Even the Upper East Side townhouse feels like a very deliberate choice by someone who understands that where you live in New York says something. Whether you think Koons is a visionary or a very well-funded trickster, this city is where his mythology was built and where the physical evidence of it lives.