What is supremely profitable today is contemporary art. How profitable? In 2019, a work called Rabbit by the artist Jeff Koons sold at auction for $91 million, setting a new record for a living artist. Walker’s work fetches hefty sums too. Yet aesthetically, and more importantly, ethically, I think they are radically and diametrically opposed. Still, they are worth pondering together, Walker’s Subtlety and Koon’s Rabbit. Because they stand before us like signs at a fork in the road, indicating the options ahead. Both are signatures of contemporary Americana. Neither could have been produced anywhere other than in the USA. Both express in remarkably accurate terms an ugliness unique to our culture. Walker’s art tells us more than we want to hear about the ugliness of our past. Koons’s silver bunny shows us the ugliness of our present, and—if we do nothing to alter its course—the ugly emptiness of our future. By polishing away any possible connection to the past, and glibly seeking succor in false innocence and false universality, Koons has produced perhaps the whitest art, ideologically not ethnically, ever created. Even the white bourgeoisie no longer find its shock value palatable. In a scathing review some years ago, Jed Perl called a Koons retrospective “a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die.” There is no real laughter, no genuine embarrassment to be had in the presence of a Koons. Irritation, indifference, transient fascination, titillation? Maybe—but never embarrassment. How could you be embarrassed? Koons, not unlike Donald Trump, is a pure pure troll: one who sees that in a society obsessed with shaming the ultimate sign of freedom, superiority, and success is shamelessness tout court, and it sells itself. It is the triumph of pure appearance—the art and politics of a deathless, lifeless, narrative-free future.