Jeff Koons is currently in very high demand. With a retrospective at the Whitney Museum and a collaboration with H&M, the artist has jumped to the top of a lot of most wanted lists, and serious collectors are willing to spend whatever it takes to own his work.
The late-2013 sale of Koons' Balloon Dog set a record for the most expensive piece ever sold by a living artist, but now you don't have to have $58,405,000 to have a stainless steel dog sculpture of your own.
ArtFCity discovered recently that there are Chinese e-commerce sites selling knockoff Balloon Dog sculptures for $500, but for obvious reasons they don't mention Koons by name and can't use the title of the piece. On Alibaba, the VLA Landscape & Architect Sculpture Co., Ltd. company sells a sculpture that is six meters tall, described as a "stainless steel sculpture of a balloon-animal dog," and they claim to have the capacity to make 10 of them a month. Koons has stopped companies from producing Balloon Dog objects in the past, but so far there has been no action against the Chinese manufacturers.
We can understand wanting to save money, but what's the point of buying fake versions of such a well-known artist's work? It seems that most people who purchase replicas of anything do so because they hope to pass it off as the real deal. When your friends come over and see a 20-foot-tall Koons sculpture on your yard, you're going to have a hard time convincing them that you're the millionaire that won the auction. You could probably get away with one of the fake Koons x H&M purses floating around the Internet, but with the sculpture, you're definitely doing too much.
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[via Artnet]
