The Society of the Balloon Dog

If you imagine the millions of products broken and discarded around the world each day, you have to wonder why a shattered porcelain statue of a balloon dog is making headlines. The animal in question, a 19-inch tall figurine designed by the artist Jeff Koons, was quite literally knocked off its pedestal by a visitor at a Miami art fair last week. It was not especially rare – 800 of this edition alone were made in 2021 – and it was not original in any formal sense: it was a statue of a balloon dog. And yet something about the accidental destruction of this object has captured the world’s attention.