Standing nearly seven feet tall, Smooth Egg with Bow is a bold, contoured, reflective surface  polished to mirror perfection. Crafted from hyper-reflective steel, it is three feet of lavishly looped ribbon atop a four by six-foot egg; a dazzling eye-candy transformed into something of a fetish. Yet the more lasting impression is one of sheer wonderment at the fastidious perfection, precision and unrelenting attention to exactitude. This is a masterwork. When you hear Koons talk about the technical skill it required, he makes it clear it was the culmination of years of laborious research, development, and groundbreaking technical advances. Consider that each egg took a crew of five working full-time an entire year to make and to achieve that glossy-colored, perfect, reflective surface, which required a pain-staking application of layer upon layer of a fine mist consisting of infinitesimal small lacquer particles. Koons has been resoundingly criticized by many for employing a small army of artist-workers to churn out products designed by him. Yet he has been transparent, and with a shrug and nod to Warhol and The Factory admonishes anyone that cares to carp. “I’m basically an idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production.”  What is clear, is that Smooth Egg with Bow could not have been fabricated any other way. It required a team of talented and knowledgeable artisans and technicians to create a work of this complexity. But it also required Koons’ total authorial control over the work and his fastidious attention to realizing a seamless finish of a work such as this. We can laugh about the well-known story of Koons in earlier times, obsessively polishing the glass vitrines of his vacuum cleaners every morning before the gallery opened to remove all human traces. But it reflects the traits of a personality type; and it explains the origin of such a creation of this degree of perfection.

Koons has stated that the reflective brilliance of stainless steel polished to a mirror quality finish was intoxicating for him and that the bright, shiny works crafted from hyper-reflective steel most accurately reflect his ever-present optimism that “people just wanted to be a part of that personality”. Twenty years ago, he saw the surface reflections as affirmations of ourselves, a wishful thought that might seem a little passé in an era of instant gratification ‘selfies’ and the many social media venues. But as the hour-long lines awaiting entrance to Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” attest, people are invariably drawn to art when offered an interactive, immersive experience.  And so, it is for Smooth Egg with Bow. Whether installed in a collector’s home, a corporate foyer, or the white box of a contemporary gallery, it is an interactive sculpture, colorful, shiny and conspicuous. It requires but a modicum of puckish humor that Koons would appreciate to imagine it installed in the Mona Lisa room at the Louvre in time to greet the morning arrivals.