Jeff Koons, Antiquity

Narrator: Take a look around this room. Koons called the series on view here Antiquity. 

Scott Rothkopf: You see, in the Antiquity series, references to the Venus of Willendorf, which is a Paleolithic sculpture. You see classical sculptures from the Greek and Roman era.

I think this is really about Koons trying to insert his practice into a very broad dialogue with the history of art.

Narrator: The subject of these sculptures may be ancient, but the technology used to produce them is cutting edge. Find Balloon Venus, the large, orange sculpture nearby. Here, Koons was not only interested in the surface. He wanted to make certain that the interior volumes accurately reflected the real twists and turns of a balloon copy of this Paleolithic form. He used a CT scanner, an x-ray scan ordinarily reserved for medical purposes, to make certain he had the details exactly right.