I’m thinking in particular of the series Luxury and Degradation, which features exact reproductions, in oil on canvas, of liquor advertisements that were contemporary when Koons made them, in 1986. The paintings pair well-known slogans—“I could go for something Gordon’s” and “I assume you drink Martell”—with staged images, combinations whose effects are both curiously meaningless and strangely charged. Replicated and monumentalized as art, they are not bubblegum Koons—dazzle that masquerades as innocence and puerility, under which lies a kind of darkness, even nastiness—and instead, flat and caustic at once.

Hard liquor is not the aesthetic or spiritual hearth of a feel-good world, the mirror in which people want to see themselves. Even if liquor does hold some promise of revelry, of escape, the ads for it are a mediated layer away from that. They are corporate fictions that do not ignite privately stored memories from good times, bad times, or any times. Mostly, they ignite memories of looking at the ads themselves—in magazines, on roadway billboards, or elsewhere—giving a sense of déjà vu. (What is being done to me? Something, but I can’t name it.)