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American artist Jeff Koons wows again in a new exhibit at the Beyeler Foundation outside Basel, Switzerland. Divided into three parts – the new, banality and celebration – the show is unapologetically trite but wholly seductive.
BASEL - There was a time when he had to work as a broker to finance his art. Today, Jeff Koons is one of the hottest contemporary artists, and his art has been crowned with a new show at Switzerland's ultra-prestigious Beyeler Foundation outside Basel.
The 57-year-old American artist has called some of his production a Trojan horse -- and when looking at any of Koons' work it's easy to imagine that he uses his art as a kind of trick to subvert commonly-accepted assessments of value and quality.
Playing tricks on art was considered shocking when Koons started out. Many critics had a go at his work, calling it trite and banal. But by now everybody knows that what emerges from his Trojan horses is banality, even the enshrinement of the banal. And Koons himself has become one of the most famous artists of our time. His name is arguably as well-known as Picasso's.
Other things that tumble out of Koons's Trojan horses are the iconic, the monumental, the smooth, the mirror-like, the Baroque, and the highly artificial – all with a Pop Art feel. Yet once that list of components comprising the artist's universe has been compiled, something else becomes apparent: it's not that simple. Which doesn't mean you have to like it – but it does mean that Jeff Koons's art is worth checking out in a new light.
Artist as seducer
Walking through the exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation, another characteristic becomes spontaneously apparent: Koons is a seducer – and a cool one, no doubt about that. And that isn't a reference to his "Made in Heaven" sex games series featuring then-playmate Ilona Staller, a.k.a Italian porn star Cicciolina. Those scandalous bits of art are nowhere to be seen in the Beyeler show and it's no loss.
The exhibit focuses on three big groups of work: "The New" (1980–1987), "Banality" (1988) and "Celebration" (since 1994). What's striking is just how many of these works have somehow ironed themselves into our visual vocabulary even if we've never actually seen the originals before.
What that means is that Koons's highly mediatized work has already found its place in the collective consciousness. He has successfully achieved his mission of creating art for everybody: according to him, "art should have as big a political impact as the entertainment industry, movies, pop music and advertising." Just what political concept underlies the gilt porcelain figure of Michael Jackson with his chimpanzee Bubbles is unclear – but what is very clear, is that the sculpture is as well-known as Jackson's songs.
Jeff Koons has the fascinating ability to appropriate things and insert them into a new context of values. Take the images of Hoover vacuum cleaners belonging to "The New" group. He somehow manages to take the admittedly attractive forms of these everyday items and -- by combining them with very precisely placed neon tube lighting -- turn them into minimalist sculptures. Without these transformations of the ready-made leading the way, the art of somebody like Damien Hirst would be unfathomable.
A strong sense of concept
In "Banality," Koons celebrates the cult of the banal by turning kitsch (or what commonly passes for it) into art. Here the trickster reappears in the deliberately ill-interpreted appropriation of the work of Marcel Duchamps. Koons's pleasure at provocation is heightened by giving it a Baroque twist to the point of sometimes imbuing the work with a sacred quality.
"I use Baroque to show that we are in the realm of the spiritual, the eternal," says Koons. "The Church used Baroque to manipulate and seduce, but in return it gave people a spiritual experience."
It's also entirely possible that Koons uses words like "spiritual" and "eternal" in a Trojan way too, banalizing them the way he does his objects: the things he says tend to be similarly smooth and excessive. But there's a system to it, and despite all the hype and glamour, a strong sense of concept.
Smooth, mirror-like, excessive characterize the third and most exciting group, "Celebration." Here we see Koons not only as a sculptor and a painter but as a technologist: complex technology is used to create this art. It is very far from the mass-produced, and takes a long time to produce after considerable development and experimentation. But unlike early 20th century Futurists, Koons isn't using this technical perfection to celebrate the beauty of a racing car or a bomb: he celebrates the beauty of balloons shaped like dogs, fake Easter eggs, and artificial flowers.
The sheer size of these harmless items turns them into benign monsters, and stretches the concept of sculpture. They mirror not only themselves but the space, visitors, light, architecture -- one thing becomes many, and the final effect is highly seductive.
Rounding out the show are some large paintings -- slices of pie, fake tulips, party hats -- that work along the same principle of hyper-perfection and reveal something quintessential about Koons's art: the beauty of banality has become a fetish.
American artist Jeff Koons wows again in a new exhibit at the Beyeler Foundation outside Basel, Switzerland. Divided into three parts – the new, banality and celebration – the show is unapologetically trite but wholly seductive.
BASEL - There was a time when he had to work as a broker to finance his art. Today, Jeff Koons is one of the hottest contemporary artists, and his art has been crowned with a new show at Switzerland's ultra-prestigious Beyeler Foundation outside Basel.
The 57-year-old American artist has called some of his production a Trojan horse -- and when looking at any of Koons' work it's easy to imagine that he uses his art as a kind of trick to subvert commonly-accepted assessments of value and quality.
Playing tricks on art was considered shocking when Koons started out. Many critics had a go at his work, calling it trite and banal. But by now everybody knows that what emerges from his Trojan horses is banality, even the enshrinement of the banal. And Koons himself has become one of the most famous artists of our time. His name is arguably as well-known as Picasso's.
Other things that tumble out of Koons's Trojan horses are the iconic, the monumental, the smooth, the mirror-like, the Baroque, and the highly artificial – all with a Pop Art feel. Yet once that list of components comprising the artist's universe has been compiled, something else becomes apparent: it's not that simple. Which doesn't mean you have to like it – but it does mean that Jeff Koons's art is worth checking out in a new light.
Artist as seducer
Walking through the exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation, another characteristic becomes spontaneously apparent: Koons is a seducer – and a cool one, no doubt about that. And that isn't a reference to his "Made in Heaven" sex games series featuring then-playmate Ilona Staller, a.k.a Italian porn star Cicciolina. Those scandalous bits of art are nowhere to be seen in the Beyeler show and it's no loss.
The exhibit focuses on three big groups of work: "The New" (1980–1987), "Banality" (1988) and "Celebration" (since 1994). What's striking is just how many of these works have somehow ironed themselves into our visual vocabulary even if we've never actually seen the originals before.
What that means is that Koons's highly mediatized work has already found its place in the collective consciousness. He has successfully achieved his mission of creating art for everybody: according to him, "art should have as big a political impact as the entertainment industry, movies, pop music and advertising." Just what political concept underlies the gilt porcelain figure of Michael Jackson with his chimpanzee Bubbles is unclear – but what is very clear, is that the sculpture is as well-known as Jackson's songs.
Jeff Koons has the fascinating ability to appropriate things and insert them into a new context of values. Take the images of Hoover vacuum cleaners belonging to "The New" group. He somehow manages to take the admittedly attractive forms of these everyday items and -- by combining them with very precisely placed neon tube lighting -- turn them into minimalist sculptures. Without these transformations of the ready-made leading the way, the art of somebody like Damien Hirst would be unfathomable.
A strong sense of concept
In "Banality," Koons celebrates the cult of the banal by turning kitsch (or what commonly passes for it) into art. Here the trickster reappears in the deliberately ill-interpreted appropriation of the work of Marcel Duchamps. Koons's pleasure at provocation is heightened by giving it a Baroque twist to the point of sometimes imbuing the work with a sacred quality.
"I use Baroque to show that we are in the realm of the spiritual, the eternal," says Koons. "The Church used Baroque to manipulate and seduce, but in return it gave people a spiritual experience."
It's also entirely possible that Koons uses words like "spiritual" and "eternal" in a Trojan way too, banalizing them the way he does his objects: the things he says tend to be similarly smooth and excessive. But there's a system to it, and despite all the hype and glamour, a strong sense of concept.
Smooth, mirror-like, excessive characterize the third and most exciting group, "Celebration." Here we see Koons not only as a sculptor and a painter but as a technologist: complex technology is used to create this art. It is very far from the mass-produced, and takes a long time to produce after considerable development and experimentation. But unlike early 20th century Futurists, Koons isn't using this technical perfection to celebrate the beauty of a racing car or a bomb: he celebrates the beauty of balloons shaped like dogs, fake Easter eggs, and artificial flowers.
The sheer size of these harmless items turns them into benign monsters, and stretches the concept of sculpture. They mirror not only themselves but the space, visitors, light, architecture -- one thing becomes many, and the final effect is highly seductive.
Rounding out the show are some large paintings -- slices of pie, fake tulips, party hats -- that work along the same principle of hyper-perfection and reveal something quintessential about Koons's art: the beauty of banality has become a fetish.
Driven by advances in artificial intelligence, the development of human-shaped robots is accelerating on both sides of the Pacific. China see it as a way of accelerating modernization of its industrial base, while American venture capitalists are betting on their mass adoption in warehouses and factories.
A visitor shakes hands with a humanoid robot during the China International Digital Economy Expo 2023.
SHENZHEN — On December 29, for the first time in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it was not a man but a humanoid robot that struck the gong. Striding down the red carpet, the 1.45 meter, 77 kg Walker S held the mallet firmly between his articulated fingers to launch the IPO of UBTech, the Chinese company that created him.
Founded in 2012 in Shenzhen, UBTech doesn't just intend to make history on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It also wants to revolutionize industry and human services by taking robotics into a new era: that of artificial bipeds, capable of interacting with humans. All this under is the benevolent gaze of Beijing, which wants to make humanoid robots the next stage in the modernization of its industrial apparatus and its race for technological leadership against Washington.
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On the other side of the Pacific, androids aren't yet listed on Wall Street, but they're already whetting investors' appetites. The Oregon-based start-up Agility Robotics has received $180 million since its inception in 2018. Its competitor Apptronik, founded in 2016 by a team from the University of Texas, had raised $15 million by 2022. The funding record is held by another start-up, Figure AI, which in February raised $675 million from artificial intelligence stars such as OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Born in Silicon Valley less than three years ago, Figure AI is valued at $2.6 billion, although its first robot is still only a prototype.
Robot's dexterity set to improve
A quarter of a century after Japan's Honda unveiled Asimo, human-shaped robots are no longer seen as a technological niche reserved for a few research laboratories. For many stakeholders, they represent a market of the future.
"Humanoid robots have been around for a long time, but since last year, something has changed. So much money is being invested in their development that it's becoming an important phenomenon for our industry," says Dr. Susan Bieller, Secretary General of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which recently ranked androids among the Top 5 trends in the sector. "The other notable fact is that in the U.S., several companies are testing and starting to use these machines," she says.
Amazon was the first to try it out, announcing last October, in one of its Seattle warehouses its experiment with Digit, the robot from Agility Robotics. For now, his "job" is limited to picking up empty plastic crates from a conveyor belt and arranging them on shelves. His steps seem slow and clumsy.
Apollo's dexterity will improve, and the range of what it can do will increase over time.
Even more than Amazon, another industry giant, GXO Logistics, has been employing Digit for the past three months in a warehouse near Atlanta, Georgia, which operates on behalf of the shapewear brand Spanx. Here too, the two-legged robot simply moves crates, but these, unlike the Amazon's, are full — according to its manufacturer, Digit can carry up to 16 kg of payload.
From the warehouse to the factory floor, BMW is just one step away in the United States: the German automaker has signed an agreement with Figure AI to "identify use cases" for its android, Figure 01, before deploying it on its huge campus in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from which 1,500 vehicles leave every day. At this stage, the two partners are not saying when or how many robots will be tested. Another German automotive giant, Mercedes-Benz, has just announced its intention to do the same, again in the U.S., this time with Apptronik's Apollo robot.
In both cases, the aim is not to replace workers on assembly lines (yet), but to test these new robots on logistics tasks. A first step, as Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas told Les Echos in October: "Our pilot projects focus on handling cartons and totes, which are the simplest applications. But Apollo's dexterity will improve, and the range of what it can do will increase over time."
Working with workers
In China, too, metal bipeds are starting to move out of the laboratories and into the factories. "You haven't seen anything yet! Humanoid robots are rapidly changing our lives, just as the iPhone and its App Store have revolutionized cell phone use," says UBTech Brand Manager Michael Tam. Discreetly, a Walker S has just entered the brand-new factory of electric car manufacturer Nio, nicknamed the "Chinese Tesla".
In the eastern Chinese suburb of Hefei, UBTech's humanoid robot carries out quality inspections (on headlights, door locks or seat belts). A video posted online also shows him applying the automaker's logo to the bodywork on an assembly line at the site, where almost a thousand industrial robots rub shoulders with some 2,000 employees.
"We've introduced training for humanoid robots. This is the first example in the world where a humanoid robot collaborates with workers on the production line to carry out vehicle assembly and quality inspection tasks," a Nio spokeswoman explains, without further details.
As China leads the race in electric vehicles, UBTech, whose Shenzhen headquarters are just a few kilometers from those of world leader BYD, is convinced that China's electric car factories will be the first equipped with new-generation robots. The automotive industry is already a major purchaser of industrial robots.
Elon Musk, the catalyst
Ironically, Tesla, the automotive brand behind this race for humanoid robots, doesn't use any in its factories yet. In August 2021, Elon Musk made the surprise announcement that Tesla was working on its own robot, Optimus. Since then, he has been touting its progress in a series of increasingly spectacular videos — but without giving a date for its launch.
Industry experts believe that the Tesla and SpaceX founder's extraordinary personality — and fortune — have acted as a catalyst, encouraging many entrepreneurs and investors to take the plunge. "The fact that Elon Musk said he wanted to develop a humanoid robot to work in his factories generated enormous attention from the media and potential customers," Bieller says.
Musk's ambitions have not escaped the notice of Chinese players either, who see their vision legitimized by the famous American entrepreneur. "Before Tesla announced its arrival in humanoid robots, a lot of people thought we were a bit crazy," Tam says.
In addition to UBTech, other Chinese robot startups (Dreame, Fourier Intelligence, Unitree Robotics, etc.) have entered the field, either as component manufacturers (Sanhua, Tuopu, LeaderDrive), or tech heavyweights such as Xiaomi (which is moving into electric cars) or electric vehicle manufacturer Xpeng.
Xi Jinping, microchips and robots
These companies are growing because they have Beijing's backing. "China is the only major country to publicly support the development of humanoid robots and to bombard it with investment," says Xie Ming, professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
In its great planning tradition, the Communist regime published a nine-page document in November 2023 setting out guidelines for the innovation and development of humanoid robots, with the aim of mass-producing them by 2025 — that's basically tomorrow.
We're at the dawn of a revolution that will profoundly change the world's production, lifestyle and industrial development.
While China is looking for new sources of growth, humanoid robots represent a new "disruptive technology as important as the arrival of computers, smartphones and new-energy vehicles," according to China's Ministry of Information and Technology, which adds that the world is at the dawn of a revolution that "will profoundly change production, human lifestyles and global industrial development.
In an effort to win this new technological race — and certainly not be left behind — China's aims to realize applications in specialized, manufacturing and consumer environments by 2025, with the creation of two to three national champions and two to three industrial development clusters. Beijing's goal is to form a world-leading supply chain and industrial ecosystem by 2027.
If the message wasn't clear enough, almost simultaneously, Chinese President Xi Jinping was seen examining semiconductors, then watching a humanoid robot walk during a rare visit to Shanghai. Two highly strategic sectors for China, which no longer wishes to depend on the United States.
In Washington, the Biden administration did not include androids in its huge post-COVID public investment plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022. Yet one federal agency has played a major role in the current progress. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon branch responsible for exploring the most futuristic technologies, launched a global challenge back in 2012 to imagine robots truly capable of replacing humans.
A year after the Fukushima disaster, the idea was to test androids for emergency interventions: getting out of a vehicle, opening a door, closing a valve, moving among rubble, etc.
After three years of competition involving laboratories from all over the world, the contest ended with the victory of Korean researchers, and did not immediately lead to commercial breakthroughs. But it did give birth to Atlas, the colossus from Boston Dynamics, whose videos of somersaults and running have garnered millions of views on YouTube.
Several former participants in the Darpa Robotics Challenge went on to found or join startups, starting with Digit and Apptronik. The latter also benefited from funding from another federal agency, NASA, for a project exploring the use of humanoid robots in space.
The United States is also advancing in another field considered essential to the rise of androids: artificial intelligence. This is what will enable robots to become truly autonomous, which means constantly analyzing their environment and acting alongside humans by understanding their needs and intentions.
ChatGPT with arms and legs
In this field too, the major maneuvers have begun in the U.S., where the quest for a "general purpose artificial intelligence" capable, like humans, of dealing with subjects of all kinds, is coupled with that of a "general purpose humanoid robot," which would make itself useful in all sorts of fields: industry, personal services and leisure.
At Nvidia's annual conference in mid-March in San Jose, California, CEO Jensen Huang presented a new generative AI model, Project GR00T ("Generalist Robot 00 Technology"), designed to accelerate the development of humanoid robots by enabling them to understand natural language and learn new movements by observing humans.
Designed as a platform, GR00T could work with various competing models. Initial partners include American companies Apptronik, Agility, Figure AI and Boston Dynamics, as well as China's Unitree Robotics. The latter caused a sensation at the Nvidia conference opening with a video of the latest version of its humanoid robot, capable of setting a new world speed record at 3.3 meters per second (7.3 mph).
Humanoid robots are seen by some as the grail for a 24-hour factory of the future.
Meanwhile, Figure AI is collaborating with OpenAI. Last month, it published a video showing its robot interacting by gesture and voice with a human, as if ChatGPT had arms and legs. In Shenzhen, UBTech is making a similar move: the company has just announced that it will integrate Ernie, the chatbot from China's Baidu, into its Walker S robot.
For IFR's Bieller, a third element explains the current craze for robots, particularly among American venture capitalists: in a country where the unemployment rate is below 4%, they are seen as an answer to the enormous need for manpower.
"Because a humanoid robot is the closest thing we have to a human worker, we can imagine entrusting it with different tasks, without having to transform processes as with traditional robots," she says. Always ready to work at any time of day, humanoid robots are seen by some as the grail for a 24-hour factory of the future.
Modernizing the world's factory
China may not be at the forefront of robotic innovation yet, but it's accelerating in leaps and bounds. As the world's biggest market for industrial robots for the past eight years, the country has seen the emergence of an entire robotics industry, supported by strong demand and generous public subsidies. As soon as the plan to support humanoids was published, China's major cities began to roll it out with a flurry of investments. Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen have all highlighted the sector in their recent development plans.
In January, Beijing even set up a 10 billion yuan (€1.3 billion) robotics fund to make the city "a world-leading center for the humanoid robot industry," Chinese media report. A Humanoid Robot Innovation Center has also been set up in Beijing, bringing together private players, public companies and academia.
China has its army of engineers but also its delay in advanced components and AI.
"China has a broad manufacturing base and a complete industrial chain. It is capable of providing technical support for robot development and a wide range of industrial application scenarios," according to a long article recently published by the official journal of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
In addition to an ultra-sophisticated supply chain and a colossal, cost-cutting market, China has a third asset: its army of engineers. It also has an Achilles heel: its delay in advanced components and artificial intelligence.
If Beijing has its way, the arrival of humanoid robots could not only enable it to modernize the world's factory, but also to achieve its goal of "nationalizing" value chains. Even today, China-made robots are still in the minority in local factories (one-third of robots installed), which depend on Western know-how. There's no reason to miss out on the next revolution.
Even more so, as another challenge looms in a rapidly aging China: the risk of a labor shortage. "There is huge demand from many industries for the use of intelligent service robotics products and services to meet the challenges associated with labor shortages and rising labor costs," UBTech states in its IPO document.
1,4 millions of robots in 2035
Initiatives on both sides of the Pacific, combined with recent colossal advances in artificial intelligence, have prompted Goldman Sachs to be much more optimistic about the future of humanoid robots. In a study published earlier this year, the American investment bank estimates that they could represent a $38 billion market by 2035, with 1.4 million units installed (four times more than forecast a year ago) — compared with just a few dozen today.
"The acceleration of AI, technological breakthroughs and increased capital investment are the main drivers of our changing forecasts," explains Goldman Sachs, which is already imagining humanoid robots working in electric car factories, or tackling tasks that are perilous for humans.
While the outlook is bright, there are still many challenges to be met if we are to make the most of this opportunity. First and foremost, humanoids will have to make progress, both in terms of mechanics and intelligence, to become truly versatile.
"Compared with conventional industrial robots, which are designed for a single task, the appeal of humanoid robots lies in their ability to do very different things, and thus potentially replace three or four robots. But we're still a long way from that," says Steve Crowe, editor-in-chief of the Robot Report website and editorial director of the Robotics Summit, held in Boston in early May.
As appealing as it is, the idea of a truly general-purpose robot is still a distant goal, and robotics researchers are divided over how long it will take to get there.
Human uncertainty
"The second crucial point is reliability," Crowe says, "The main reason companies equip themselves with robots, whatever they may be, is because they want their production lines to run day after day, without the uncertainty associated with the human factor."
Biped robots will therefore have to make progress if they are to be as reliable and efficient as conventional industrial robots, which have been in use for decades. They will also have to become competitive in terms of price: the first humanoid robots, manufactured in units for a handful of research laboratories, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. To convince companies, the consensus is that prices will have to drop below $100,000.
Walker's current cost is in the $100,000 range, but it could be halved by 2025.
"When Digit is produced in large quantities, its price will drop considerably, to become comparable to that of a car," says Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and Chief Robots Officer of Agility Robotics. The start-up has just begun construction of a factory in Oregon capable of producing 10,000 bipedal robots a year. Competitor Apptronik, meanwhile, is aiming to drop below the $50,000 mark, again without setting a date.
As for Musk, never stingy with shock promises, in 2022 he mentioned a price of $20,000 for Optimus — cheaper than the least expensive Tesla. That vision is widely shared at UBTech's Shenzhen headquarters. "For the moment, Walker's cost is in the $100,000 range, but it could be halved by 2025 thanks to the mass production of humanoid robots and the development of technologies," Tam says.
Whether the approach is driven by startups and venture capital, as in the United States, or instigated and supported by central government, as in China, these questions of use case, reliability and cost will be crucial to winning this new technological race.
