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.)

“I assume you drink Martell,” the attractive virago with shining white eyes says. I remember this ad.

The company had another ad in the same series, a similar couple, good-looking young professionals, reading different parts of a newspaper that is spread over the floor in some kind of magnificent domicile, huge and unfurnished. Trying to decode what kind of space it is, I’m reminded of a comment in Amazons, a novel DeLillo wrote under a pseudonym, that “apartments sprawl,” while “houses ramble.” We are in the territory of the sell. The couple lounges around in a sprawling apartment somewhere on the East Coast (he’s wearing sockless loafers). It’s clearly Sunday, given the size of the newspaper dismantled on the floor. He touches her hair with the end of his pencil. It’s the same gesture, if a different pair of actors/models, as the light tug on the shirttail at the beach. It’s, Stop pretending to finish that Times crossword puzzle. What happens next is off-screen, but on the screens of our imagining. Not anything explicit. Just possibility.

Koons’s linking of refinement with debasement recalls Joan Didion’s closing comment in her essay on the Getty Villa, which, she says, serves as “a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.” Tacky and overt signs of luxury are for the poor. Tasteful, subdued signs of luxury are for the rich. But the very richest do not buy Frangelico. They buy Jeff Koons paintings of liquor advertisements, sure that they are in on the joke, which is how any palpable contract—between peddler and consumer, artist and critic, artist and collector—functions best.

At the height of a roiling controversy, before Kanders ultimately resigned from the Whitney board—and well before Safariland tear gas canisters were fired on crowds of American protestors in cities small and large across this country after the murder of George Floyd—I found myself in a social situation that included a different Whitney trustee, at a dinner party where this trustee felt comfortable and assumed she was with her own kind. (One of the many ironies of the art world is the palpable contract between the wealthy who sustain the art and artists who make it. The lowly writer, outside this contract, is nonetheless occasionally summoned to appear, paid in dinner, and expected to behave.) This trustee, a woman in a silver bubble jacket, assured me that “Tear gas is not only necessary but sometimes it’s really quite desirable!” The civilized way to lay down the law. “I mean, imagine if we didn’t have it!” She invoked Ferguson and other “scary” situations. I transitioned away from her and poured myself a drink.

What the trustee meant to make explicit, without having to spell it out—because why should this woman in a silver bubble jacket, esteemed patron of the arts, have to speak in a language not graced with nuance, given that abstraction, after all, is the language of the rich?—what she really meant to communicate to me was that the alternative to tear gas was shooting people, and with live ammunition, and at least none of the trustees were involved in that!

In a mise en abyme of these dyads, the Whitney Museum catalog for the Jeff Koons retrospective included an in situ image of I Could Go for Something Gordon’s