The Emperor Has No Clothes

When did we become afraid to ask what the artist actually created?

By Alejandro E. Trimper

Several years ago, I was at a pop-up exhibition called SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City when something rather wonderful happened.

Someone had left a pair of eyeglasses on the floor beneath a narrow, empty section of wall. No wall tag, nothing that would indicate they were part of the exhibition, but they were also positioned convincingly enough that people began to gather around them.

And then the analysis started. People discussed the placement of the glasses, their relationship to the empty wall, the color, the symbolism of vision, what the artist might have been saying about perception and absence, perhaps even our inability to see what is directly in front of us. Very quickly, it became the focus of everyone in the room. There was only one problem.

It wasn’t art.

By accident, someone had been sitting there and forgotten their glasses. Eventually, the owner came back and quickly scooped them up and walked away.

Exhibition over.

I have thought about those glasses and that experience many times since, not because the people standing around them were captivated by a simple pair of glasses, nor because their academic observations made them stupid. They weren’t. They were intelligent people doing exactly what museums, universities, critics, dealers, and the art world at large have spent generations conditioning us to do: look closely, assume intention, search for meaning, and try very hard not to be the person in the room who doesn’t get it.

What interests me is that nobody seemed willing to ask the simplest question first. Are we sure those aren’t just somebody’s glasses? Which was my first thought: “Who lost their glasses?”

Which, when you think about it, is basically The Emperor’s New Clothes with better lighting and a museum membership.

Hans Christian Andersen understood the problem perfectly. The emperor’s imaginary clothes could supposedly be seen only by intelligent, competent people, which created a rather effective social trap. Nobody wanted to admit they saw nothing, because admitting it said more about them than about the clothes, or in this case, the eyeglasses.

That is the part of the story that matters here: not simply that the emperor was naked, but that everyone could see it and still felt pressured to admire the beautiful fabric, the attention to detail, the embroidery and the exquisite tailoring.

I increasingly think parts of the art world have spent the last several generations building their own version of that parade. Don’t understand why something is groundbreaking? Perhaps you don’t understand conceptualism. Don’t see the originality? You need a long-winded academic explanation and more context.

Think an object looks suspiciously like something you’ve already seen at a toy store, gift shop, kitchen, hardware store or children’s birthday party? You don’t understand appropriation. And somewhere along the way, asking what seems to me like the most obvious question became vaguely embarrassing.

What did the artist actually create?

This is where Marcel Duchamp enters the conversation, because there is no honest way around him.

In 1917, Duchamp submitted a commercially manufactured urinal, signed “R. Mutt,” titled it Fountain, and forced the art world to confront a genuinely radical proposition: perhaps the artist’s act of choosing, recontextualizing, and naming an ordinary object could itself constitute an artistic act. The contemporary defense of Fountain was essentially that Duchamp had created a new thought for an existing object. That idea was enormously consequential, and nearly a century later a survey of hundreds of artists, critics, curators and dealers ranked Fountain as the most influential modern artwork.

I totally disagree, but fine. With that one collective act of surrender, Duchamp won.

I am not interested in pretending otherwise. His contribution was not the urinal. It was the proposition, and the proposition changed art.

The problem came later, when an exceptional intellectual breakthrough slowly became a repeatable and commercially accepted formula.

Duchamp opened a door. The art world eventually tore down the wall, demolished the house, and began selling the rubble in cute plexiglass display boxes.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Jeff Koons.

And before somebody sends me a furious email, let me say the thing that is actually true: the fabrication of the monumental-scale Balloon Dog is extraordinary. The Whitney Museum describes it as being made from sixty separate precision-engineered stainless-steel parts, cast and finished at a specialized California foundry. It is ten feet high, weighs about a ton, and exists in five versions, each in a different color.

That is serious engineering and fabrication. But whose skill are we admiring?

Koons himself has been remarkably candid. In a statement quoted by the Whitney, he described himself as “basically the idea person,” said he was not physically involved in production, and acknowledged that he goes to specialists because he does not have the abilities required to make the work himself. There is nothing inherently disqualifying about that.

Artists have used workshops, foundries, assistants, printers and fabricators for centuries. Rubens had a workshop. Warhol had the Factory. Sol LeWitt deliberately created works as sets of instructions to be executed by other people. A sculptor using a foundry is not somehow less of an artist because he did not personally operate the furnace.

So the question is not whether Koons physically made Balloon Dog. The question is much more interesting. If Koons is the idea person, what part of the idea did he originate?

He did not invent balloon animals. He did not invent the balloon dog. He did not create the familiar twisted-balloon vocabulary from which the form comes.

What he did was take an existing, well-known object, recreate it at monumental scale in stainless steel, demand extraordinary technical precision, and place it in the context of his artistic practice. Those are artistic decisions. I am not pretending otherwise.

I am asking whether those decisions constitute enough original artistic creation to justify everything the art world subsequently placed around the object.

That is a question we should be able to ask without anyone immediately reaching for a graduate seminar, a can of pepper spray and a taser, or a lawyer drafting a cease-and-desist letter.

And this is where I have to complicate my own argument, because not every absurd-looking conceptual work fails this test, unfortunately. Take Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the banana duct-taped to a wall.

You would think this would be my easiest target. It isn’t.

Cattelan did not invent bananas. He did not invent duct tape. The materials are essentially worthless and replaceable. Yet the particular combination, presentation and proposition were his, and the absurdity is largely the point. My glasses incident happened in 2016, three years before Comedian, which makes the accidental version even funnier in hindsight. An edition of the concept, documented by a certificate and installation instructions, eventually sold at Sotheby’s for $6.24 million with fees.

You can think that is brilliant. You can think it is ridiculous. I can regularly think both before my first cup of coffee in the morning.

But Cattelan created a proposition that did not previously exist in that form. There is something there to argue about. That matters, because my issue is not conceptual art. It is the absence of meaningful original artistic creation or contribution.

I have come to believe Fine Art should require some form of that original contribution. Not necessarily beauty. Not realism. Not complexity. Not traditional craftsmanship. Not even personal fabrication.

Creation. One simple word.

Jackson Pollock did not invent paint, pouring or abstraction. What he did with them became unmistakably Pollock. Robert Motherwell did not invent black pigment or geometric form. He developed a visual language that became his. Keith Haring did not invent chalk, babies, barking dogs or pictograms. He created a visual vocabulary and iconography so distinctive, so uniquely his own that you can recognize it instantly, even if you don’t know who Keith Haring was.

Artists do not have to invent the ingredients. They are supposed to create the meal.

That is why Koons’s Seated Ballerina bothers me more than Cattelan’s banana. The underlying figure came from Lenochka, a porcelain sculpture by Ukrainian artist Oksana Zhnikrup. Koons legally licensed the design. That matters, because this is not an accusation of copyright theft. But when the monumental ballerina appeared at Rockefeller Center in 2017, Zhnikrup was not initially publicly identified. Her role became known after questions were raised, and Koons’s studio subsequently acknowledged the source.

The license answers the legal question. It does not answer the artistic one.

Zhnikrup created the underlying figure. Koons enlarged it, altered its material and context, and presented it within his practice. So what portion of the artistic authorship belongs to whom?

Sometimes the legal record makes the distinction even less theoretical. In Rogers v. Koons, photographer Art Rogers sued after Koons used Rogers’s photograph Puppies as the basis for String of Puppies. The Second Circuit described Koons buying Rogers’s photograph and directing artisans to reproduce the composition and expressive details. The court found infringement and rejected Koons’s fair-use defense.

I don’t need to tell you what conclusion to reach about Koons. I would rather ask you to perform a small experiment.

Take away the famous name and the global marketing machine. Take away the auction result. Take away the museum retrospective. Take away the catalogue essay. Look at what existed before the artist arrived and what existed afterward.

What did the artist create?

Sometimes the answer will be enormous and rock the very foundation of the art world. Sometimes it may be surprisingly small, just a subtle shift in perception.

There is another distinction that matters just as much: the difference between making art accessible and making the hierarchy unintelligible.

Keith Haring understood that accessibility did not require category confusion. The Pop Shop sold T-shirts and novelty objects because he wanted people beyond traditional collectors to have access to his imagery, and he said explicitly that he did not want those products to cheapen the art. A T-shirt remained a T-shirt. A unique studio painting or drawing remained a unique work. The hierarchy was intelligible and intentional.

Haring used products to give people access to the art. Too much of today’s market uses the aura of art to elevate the products. In my opinion, that hierarchy is now much less clear. Every edition, color variation, collectible, collaboration and branded object carrying a famous visual vocabulary seems to arrive wrapped in some version of the Fine Art label.

This is where the original monumental scale of Balloon Dog matters. Koons took an ephemeral birthday-party object and made it ten feet high and one ton in polished steel. Fine. That is a transformation. But the form did not remain monumental or scarce. It later reappeared in smaller porcelain editions, including a blue edition of 799. If the original trick was turning an everyday object into something extraordinary, at what point does producing enough versions of the extraordinary thing turn it right back into an everyday object?

Damien Hirst raises the same question from another direction. Gagosian’s 2012 survey included more than 300 Spot paintings. His Cherry Blossoms began as 107 paintings, then moved into print editions in the hundreds and thousands and a separate series of 900 Paper Blossoms. Each new release can arrive numbered, signed, authorized and ready to sell. Fine. But when does the Fine Art become an edition, the edition become a collectible, and the collectible become a branded product?

I do not have a universal number, and I do not think one exists. An edition of ten is not automatically Fine Art, and an edition of one thousand is not automatically merchandise. The distinction depends on what was created, how much changes between iterations, how honestly scarcity is described and, most importantly, what the buyer is being told he or she owns.

Of course, none of this would bother me quite so much if we had not attached enormous amounts of money to it. That is where a philosophical argument about what constitutes art turns into an art-market problem.

Contemporary art is particularly dependent on reputation because quality is difficult to quantify. Galleries, critics, curators, collectors, museums and other intermediaries help establish reputations, and those reputations become signals buyers use when deciding what deserves attention and what might justify a particular price.

There is nothing sinister about expertise. I want a conservator to know more about conservation than I do. I want an art historian who has spent thirty years studying an artist to tell me what I am missing. Expertise is one of the great pleasures of this business when it opens a door, and when it’s not compromised.

The problem begins when expertise stops saying, “Let me show you,” and starts saying, “If you still don’t see it, the problem is you.” That is artsplaining, the nasty cousin of mansplaining. When the two are combined, they send chills down my spine.

And artsplaining is wonderfully convenient for a market because it teaches the buyer not to trust his own eyes.

The gallery is important. The museum owns one. The critic wrote about it. Someone famous bought three. One sold at auction for $500,000. There must be something here I don’t understand. Maybe. Or perhaps someone left their glasses on the floor, and your intuition is correct.

The market itself is also more complicated than the beautifully lit auction-room mythology suggests. Primary-market supply can be tightly controlled. Works can be selectively placed with collectors. Galleries can try to discourage rapid resale through mind-numbingly complex contracts. Auctions use reserves, guarantees, irrevocable bids and chandelier bidding, mechanisms that can be perfectly legal and disclosed while still operating very differently from the simple image of two independent buyers discovering “true value” by raising paddles against one another.

That does not mean auctions are rigged. It means price discovery in art comes with complex machinery and a user manual that is incomprehensible to the average Joe.

And when enough influential people become interested in an artist at the same time, momentum can create genuine demand of its own. The waiting list grows. Prices rise. Auction results generate publicity. Publicity attracts more buyers. Nobody has to manufacture the final demand because, eventually, the momentum starts doing it for them. The price itself begins behaving like a critical review.

Someone paid a million dollars. Surely the emperor must have a very nice coat.

KAWS is useful here because his market demonstrates how easily we confuse fame with liquidity, and a famous visual brand with Fine Art. Whatever you think of the work, KAWS became a global cultural phenomenon. Museum exhibitions, fashion collaborations, vinyl figures, prints, clothing, commercial partnerships, enormous social recognition.

Artnet’s data put his auction turnover at roughly $112.9 million in 2019. By 2025 it was $7.72 million, his lowest annual total in a decade. That is about a 93 percent decline in annual auction turnover.

It does not mean every KAWS object lost 93 percent of its value. It means fame and liquidity are not the same thing. Nor are familiarity and abundance the same thing as scarcity.

Christie’s documents that just one early Companion release involved 1,500 figures across three colors. The broader research into early KAWS vinyl editions identifies more than 20,000 numbered objects across selected releases through 2010, before later collaborations, prints, merchandise and open-edition production enter the conversation.

There is nothing wrong with building a global visual brand. There is also nothing wrong with buying one because you love it. But a collector should understand which market he or she is actually participating in, and whether the object is Fine Art, a limited edition, a collectible or a product.

A rare Ferrari can be worth tens of millions and may maintain or increase in value even if it is driven. A baseball card can be worth millions. A dinosaur skeleton can be worth millions. None becomes Fine Art simply because the price has enough zeroes at the end.

Collectibility is not the same thing as Fine Art, no matter who told you otherwise.

And perhaps this is why the whole subject irritates me more than it otherwise would.

While the art world has spent enormous amounts of money and attention chasing the next sensation, artists quietly work in studios every day, trying to make something that was not there yesterday, often sacrificing an extraordinary amount for the privilege of being able to create.

They practice. They fail. They start again. They learn their materials. They develop a visual language. Some of them spend decades reaching the point where a work finally feels unquestionably their own.

Not all of that work will be good. Technical ability alone has never guaranteed great art. There are astonishingly skilled artists making terribly dull pictures, just as there are artists with limited conventional technique who have produced profound, revolutionary works.

But attention is finite. Museum walls (and storage units) are finite. Gallery walls are finite. Most collector budgets are finite; some collectors have virtually unlimited budgets. Critical attention is finite. And the market’s appetite for the “next big thing” can move much faster than an artist’s career should or can support.

The pandemic-era boom in younger contemporary artists demonstrated exactly how dangerous that acceleration can become. Auction spending on artists born after 1974 jumped dramatically in 2021, then reversed as the speculative market cooled. Individual works suffered extraordinary price declines. Amani Lewis’s Into the Valley, the Boy Walks sold at Phillips in November 2021 for $107,100. When the same work later returned to auction at Christie’s, it sold for $10,080.

Same artist. Same work. A radically different market.

That does not mean the work suddenly became bad. It means the price was never the same thing as the art. And the artist is often the person left living with the consequences after the market moves on to its next obsession. That is the part I think we discuss too little.

We talk about collectors losing money. We talk about auction houses missing estimates. We talk about galleries managing prices.

But imagine having your career accelerated into six figures before you have even had time to understand what kind of artist you are going to become, only to watch the same market decide a few years later that it has found somebody newer, the next “new shiny object to covet.”

That is not stewardship. It is churn, feeding the insatiable appetite of “the machine.”

The physical art world is also beginning to confront another reality: we already own an astonishing amount of stuff. A 2026 Government Accountability Office report found that 74 percent of American museums surveyed said their storage either did not meet their needs or only somewhat met them, while museums generally display only a small portion of their collections.

That does not prove museums are stuffed with bad art. It does prove that accumulation has consequences and limitations.

Collectors eventually face their own version of the same question. What happens when an estate inherits hundreds of objects? What happens when the children do not want them? What happens when the auction house does not want them? What happens when the gallery has moved on? What happens when a famous name has plenty of recognition but relatively few buyers at yesterday’s prices?

An object can have an impressive historical asking price and still have no buyer today. That is not necessarily value. Sometimes it is simply a memory of value.

Which brings us to the current market. The art market did not collapse in 2023, 2024 or 2025. Global sales actually rose 4 percent to $59.6 billion after two years of decline. But beneath that headline, the distribution changed. Art Basel described a “structural rebalancing toward established artists and older market sectors.” Contemporary dealers were stagnant while Old Masters and Modern specialists grew, and other data showed renewed strength in older categories.

We cannot prove from those numbers that collectors collectively decided contemporary art had gone too far. Markets are never that tidy, or obvious. But I think we are allowed to wonder whether some collectors are becoming more skeptical or feeling a little burned.

Maybe they are beginning to differentiate between recognition and demand. Price from value. Institutional approval from quality. Collectibility from Fine Art. And designation from creation. If so, I don’t think that would be a crisis for art. It might be healthy, and exactly what the doctor ordered.

Which brings me back, finally, to the emperor. The child in Andersen’s story was not necessarily smarter than everyone else. The child simply had nothing invested in pretending.

That matters in an art market where collectors own the work, galleries represent it, museums have acquired it, curators have exhibited it, scholars have written about it and auction houses have sold it. Nobody has to be sitting behind a curtain plotting anything. People can simply have very good reasons for wanting yesterday’s judgments to remain true tomorrow, a year from now or a decade from now.

I say all of this as someone who sells art for a living, which admittedly makes questioning the sanity of the art market a slightly unusual marketing strategy.

But this is also why I keep coming back to transparency, stewardship, expertise, and trust, the very foundation and core values of our business.

Expertise should help you see more, not make you frightened to say what you see. Transparency should tell you who created something, who fabricated it, where the idea came from, how many exist and what the market actually looks like. Stewardship should mean caring about the artist and collector after the excitement has passed. And trust should allow a gallery to occasionally say “the thing” that is not particularly convenient to say aloud.

So no, I am not asking you to hate Jeff Koons. I am not asking you to throw Duchamp out of the history books. I am not arguing that conceptual art is illegitimate. I am asking something much simpler.

Look carefully. Understand the history. Listen to the explanation. Ask who actually created what you are looking at. Then make up your own mind.

Sometimes someone explains an artwork, and suddenly you see something extraordinary that you had completely missed. That is one of the great pleasures of art.

And sometimes someone just forgot their glasses, and the emperor is really naked.

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