Dear Art Collectors,
The following essay is the text of my Ash Wednesday meditation that I wanted to share with those who could not attend.
There was something amusingly disturbing about a $42,000 Jeff Koons sculpture smashing into hundreds of pieces on a gallery floor at an art fair in Miami. It was not the destructive work of vandals, or some politically charged performance art by animal rights activists. No, a lady was intrigued by the buoyant, bright blue, porcelain shaped into a balloon-dog, the kind a clown would shape for a child’s birthday party.
She tapped it to see if it was balloon or something else and, well, a moment later she learned it was indeed fragile.... definitely porcelain.
You may remember in 2013 a 10’ x 12’ x 4’ Koons orange balloon dog auctioned at Christie’s for a record-setting $58.4 million dollars. The first set of balloon dogs were mirror-polished stainless steel with a thin clearcoat. Knowing that, one may slightly forgive the curious art critic for checking to see the construction material of the smaller blue doggy.
Don’t fret, however; Koons made 799 of the porcelain versions, and on Thursday, February 16, 798 of them suddenly became more valuable.
Curiously, the smashed version captured the attention of every art dealer and aficionado on the premises, ignoring all other sculptures and paintings when the
gallery owner grabbed a dustpan and broom. Art collector Sam Gamson immediately saw an opportunity and has offered to buy the shards for an undisclosed amount. The gallery is still mulling over their decision.
Yes, there are nearly 800 16” Koons Balloon Dogs, but only one of them is broken.
So of course, the question now is the value of something formerly known as art.
The fragility of things.
When cancer moves into your home, you think a lot about fragility, temporality, mortality. There’s that moment when life perched in its neatly nestled place gets tapped, perhaps as a check to see what it’s made of. The touch wasn’t forceful. Still, it begins to fall, but not with a crash. It tumbles in a breathtaking slow-motion descent.
Equally helpless to stop the descent, awkward hands flail in air to break the fall before the fall breaks. At one moment, things look good, bringing hope of a just-in-time reaction, catching it early enough. But life’s fragility and the world’s hard floors leave final outcomes, you might say, unpredictable.
So, grasp you do. One moment as playful, resilient and luminescent as a balloon animal twisted into giggles at a children’s fair, the next... well, you just don’t know.
And so, we come of a Wednesday named for ashes. In ancient kilns, unfired porcelain pieces were carefully placed on the shelves within the brick walls of a kiln. Wood, and later coal, was fired under the greenware holders. Grand billows forced oxygen into the blazing embers, building their heat to reach the over 1,600-degree temperatures necessary to change the chemistry in the clay itself, to make it hard, nonporous, beautiful.
One day, two maybe, the fuel fully expended – reduced to ash. The real art, delicate, graceful, solid, facilitated.
It’s the ash we talk about on Ash Wednesday – the stuff that burns, disintegrates, a reminder of the fuel that makes the rest of it possible.
We remember our fleeting, consumable stuff of life, perhaps ignited and glowing for the sake of some other cause, another beauty, a creation, an exhibition. But even that too is fragile. A single tap, a curious nudge and crash... even that for which we gave our last extinguished flame.
Why think of it? Why ponder its absence of intrinsic or eternal value? Perhaps because an offer has been made for the shards and ash of what we thought we were becoming.
A bid offered for us, each of us who were formerly known as. An offer that renders all of it... all of us... priceless, through Christ.
Keeping my hands firmly in my pockets while wandering through the gallery of life, I remain
With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor