In Partnership With Jeff Koons, Hublot Presents The Classic Fusion Balloon Dog

Jeff Koons is one of the most controversial artists of the last half century, and I can’t think of a single artist whose work has been more consistently polarizing. A master of the rage economy before there was a rage economy, Koons’ work ploughs the fertile field where pop culture, mass consumerism, banal optimism, deep cynicism, and hype cross-pollinate. His most famous work, and the one which inspired these watches, is “Balloon Dog,” which is not a single work, but a series of monumental sculptures that look exactly like the balloon dogs a clown might make at a child’s birthday party (which is what some people might call Koons, come to think of it) – except that the Balloon Dog sculptures are ten feet long, twelve feet high, made of stainless steel polished to a mirror finish, and weigh about a ton. They have also sold for incredibly huge sums of money, which is actually part of the artwork, especially if your view of Koons’ work is that it’s a money-grabbing, cynically conceived stunt that’s far more interesting as a study in marketing and cult-of-personality than it is as an artwork – the record for a Balloon Dog was the sale at Sotheby’s, in 2014, of “Balloon Dog (Orange)” for $58.4 million of your favorite dollars.

If this sounds to you like something that leaves little room for a middle ground, in terms of reactions and reviews, boy howdy are you right. In 2004, Ken Johnson, reviewing a Koons show at C&M arts for The New York Times, gushed:

“But the ‘Balloon Dog,’ an elephantine stainless steel copy of a balloon twisted into the form of a big-earred creature, is unequivocally wonderful. With its bulbous volumes, like giant sausage links, coated in translucent, coppery orange lacquer, it has a breathtaking physical presence.

“Note the beautifully realized knot that serves as its nose and its perky, phallic tail. Like its much smaller ancestor, ”Rabbit,’ it evokes the euphoric, childlike optimism of modernity while adding a certain priapic excitement.”

Yeah, well, Ken Johnson, here’s what you might call an opposing view, quoted by The Guardian’s Emma Brocke, in a preamble to an interview with Koons from 2015:

“Robert Hughes, the late art critic for Time magazine, loathed Koons’ work so much that he described him as having ‘the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida’. As a result, wrote Hughes, ‘you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.'”

What is not a matter of opinion, is that Koons has been hugely successful, both in keeping himself in the public eye, and continuing to create both starry-eyed encomiums as well as veritable fountains of vitriol. Seen from that perspective, a partnership with Hublot seems not only natural, but practically inevitable.

Here’s what we’ve got: three watches in the Classic Fusion Family, which Hublot has redesigned to look as much as possible as if they’re made from balloons as well, or at least, from inflatable components.

One of the watches is in mirror polished stainless steel, and the other two are in mirror polished anodized aluminum, bright red and bright blue. The specs are fairly conventional: 42mm x 11mm cases, 50 meter water resistance, and the straps have a rubber base, with “debossed” (debossing is the process of pressing a design into a material) leather inserts for the blue and red models, and debossed polymer for the steel model, with tone-on-tone stitching across all three straps.

I will say, Hublot has been pretty thorough about making as many parts as possible look as if they were blown up with a bicycle pump (or maybe a tank of balloon-dog helium). The bezels are tumescent; the dials are tumescent, the markers are tumescent, the crown is tumescent; the bezel screws are subtly but unmistakably tumescent; the case looks like it could double for a Bouncy House (speaking of kid’s birthday parties) and even the rotor for the movement (caliber HUB1710, although seldom have the technical characteristics of a movement been less relevant to a watch than now) is tumescent. The pusher for the One Click strap quick release which protrudes so saucily at 10:00 is most assertively tumescent, but then again this is a collab with an artist one of whose provocations were explicit sculptures of himself and his wife, in glass, in as it were, flagrante delicto, so that pusher is at least by comparison, a model of blushing discretion.

The above is from my meeting with Hublot in Geneva over Geneva Watch Days and as you can see, however assertively transgressive you might think the watches are from the official images, they’re even more so in person.

It’s a funny thing, being transgressive – to someone coming to watchmaking looking for a sturdy, value-added daily driver, or a refined platform for demonstrating the classic bench techniques of fine haute horlogerie, or indeed, to anyone not looking specifically for a watch collaboration with Jeff Koons and Hublot, these will produce reactions ranging from indifference to perplexity to outrage, but in a way, taken in a larger context, these are actually rather dignified. Koons himself is no longer a youthful agent provocateur, but rather, an elder statesman of the art world whose work has matured and achieved its own kind of grandeur (albeit it’s a Mad King Ludwig kind of grandeur, but it takes all kinds; baroque overstatement crossbred with pop culture is a niche genre, but a genre nonetheless). And in an art world where a banana taped to a wall is selling for $6.2 million, these watches and the artworks on which they are based look less like an outrage, and more a celebration of a long and successful career in which a whole range of highly personal visual idioms have become an established part of the art landscape. In their own way, these are celebratory pieces – if not of traditional fine watchmaking, then at least of the achievements of a modern artist whose massive scale in terms of number of artworks, cost of production, and ability to generate gobs of price records, makes Andy Warhol’s Factory look like a lemonade stand.

The Hublot Classic Fusion Balloon Dog By Jeff Koons watches are limited editions of 200 pieces each; US price, $25,100. 

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