“To live is to war with trolls.” — Ibsen
The United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space strictly forbids “harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.” It explicitly prohibits placing weapons of mass destruction in outer space.
Despite this prohibition, sculptures by marketing con artist Jeff Koons landed on the moon yesterday in the NASA-funded moon lander Odysseus. Koons now crows that he created “the first authorized artwork on the moon.”
As if this act of extraterrestrial vandalism wasn’t enough, each of the sculptures on the moon has two counterparts on earth: a larger statue and a digital NFT (nonfungible token), thereby dispelling any ambiguity about the mercenary core of this art.
Just as the planets may align on rare occasions, this project represents a rare alignment of corporate greed, bad politics, self-aggrandizement and execrable taste.
Carolyn Russo, the credulous Museum Specialist at the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, gushed: “Why wouldn’t artists look to the moon as a new place to offer a new cultural understanding of who we are as a civilization?”
Let us hope that space aliens never stumble across Koons’ “understanding of who we are as a civilization,” or they may feel compelled to retaliate for our littering their front lawn.