Is art dead, or is Jeff Koons’ Rabbit really worth $91 million?

The piece sold at auction last week for $91.1 million with fees, which may not have been a surprise to some followers of Koons. The artist is famous for his pop culture subjects, including balloon animals such as Rabbit. He also holds the record for the third most expensive work by a living artist, for his $58.4 million balloon dog.

(Christie’s Images Ltd. via AP)

Koons’ style, with its reimagining of the mundane, has been compared to that of Marcel Duchamp. But not every art critic is buying it.

In fact, it’s popular in the art world to critique the sculptor and painter, especially for his terrible ’90s phase, which included pornographic artwork he created of himself and his wife at the time. Former chief art critic for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman wrote a scathing review of the artist in 1991.

“Mr. Koons delivers an unabashedly cynical message,” Kimmelman said. “His works continue to celebrate the emptiness, meaninglessness and Disneylike unreality of contemporary life, now extended to the arena of love. But the hollowness the artist reveals seems fundamentally his own.”

Of Koons’ work, Rabbit may be his best. The 1986 sculpture, designed to look like a balloon animal, embodies the excess of the ’80s; it’s over-the-top, glitzy, even tacky, but still aspirational. But is it worth $91 million? To someone, it is.

Robert Mnuchin (that’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s father) delivered the winning bid on Rabbit, but he hasn’t revealed on whose behalf he was bidding. Artnet reported Tuesday that the work’s mystery buyer was hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, who presumably has a large, semi-empty living room somewhere, just waiting for a centerpiece to spice up his next dinner party.

As a symbol of American excess, Koons’ Rabbit becomes somehow more poetic through its $91 million purchase. If beauty is relative, and if the value of art is relative, then so is its price. The most important thing to remember about the extravagantly priced Rabbit is that the money doesn’t mean it’s good. It just makes it a billionaire’s conversation piece.