Top dog ... Balloon Dog (Yellow), 1994-2000

My life in art: I was bitten by Jeff Koons's dog

The American artist's giant sculpture of a balloon pooch didn't impress me much until I came face to face with it in Manhattan, writes Will Gompertz

Will Gompertz
Thursday 10 November 2008

I hate fireworks. They're expensive, even more disappointing than a Bob Dylan gig and are gratuitously noisy. The unexpected bangs make me jump and petrify my dog. Last night we went to bed together.

Mind you, fireworks aren't as bad as balloons. I properly hate balloons, and have done since I was a child. It's like having an unexploded bomb in the house. Except people avoid unexploded bombs. With a balloon, all they ever want to do is squeeze, prod and stamp on the wretched thing to see what it takes to make it burst. And the answer is always the same – not a lot.

All of which may go some way to explain why I had never been a huge fan of the giant sculpture Balloon Dog (1994–2000) made by the American artist Jeff Koons. I have always considered it too simplistic, too vulgar, too 80s. But that was before I visited New York a couple of weeks ago.

I was there to give a talk to some New York creative industry types about my work at Tate. New York is a long way to go for a lecture, so I padded the trip with meetings with art-world types. One such meeting was with Anne Strauss, a contemporary-art curator at that priceless jewel known as the Met. Anne had invited me to take a look at what she described as a "small" Jeff Koons exhibition she had curated on the museum's roof. In fact, there was nothing small about it. They had winched three of Jeff Koons's gargantuan stainless-steel sculptures on to their bijou roof. The sculptures completely dominated the skyline, their garish colours and highly polished forms battering your senses.

The first thing that hits you is Balloon Dog, a 10ft, ultra-shiny, yellow recreation of the sort of concoction a children's entertainer makes out of balloons. Next to it was an equally monstrous, also ultra-shiny, sculpture called Sacred Heart. This burgundy hunk of kitsch was a perfect replica of a fancy sweet a lucky child might find in a party bag after leaving a rich friend's birthday bash. To the left of these two was Coloring Book, a giant recreation of a page from a Winnie the Pooh colouring book. This one was the tallest and the most abstract. The others were perfect copies of recognisable commodities of a modern child's life, albeit enlarged to a ridiculous scale. All three come from Koons's Celebration series, a group of sculptures mimicking childish things. According to Strauss, there's a good reason behind the series.

In 1991, Koons married the Italian porn star-turned-politician Cicciolina (Ilona Staller). With her, he created a series of artworks called Made in Heaven, which are basically stylised hardcore porn. They also had a son called Ludwig. Things didn't work out, they split up, and Cicciolina did a runner back to Italy with the boy. Koons was devastated. With no way to communicate with his child, Koons did what he does best and made monumental, eye-catching, media-friendly sculptures. The media-savvy Koons knew that these cartoonish images would be transported around the world in newspapers, magazines, television and the web, and therefore form some sort of communication with his son. He chose a sentimental subject for a subject he was sentimental about. It's a sad story that shows there's a bit more to Balloon Dog than mere pastiche. This went some way towards melting my heart. But what really got me was seeing Central Park reflected on its gleaming body.

The roof of the Met has one of the greatest views in the whole world. Really. Alone, it's worth the trip to New York. The day I was there it was the perfect autumn scene. A warm sunlit Central Park surrounded us. On the horizon were the fine houses of Upper West Side. To the south, the trees majestically morphed into skyscrapers, as park becomes city. There's a glorious feeling of space and beauty, a sense of utopia – man and nature in perfect harmony. Except you can't quite escape a sense of the menace of the city, its raucousness carried within the rustle of the trees. The adrenaline rush of seeing such perfection is tinged with the knowledge that it isn't quite real. It might seem that you have escaped to a better place but all the time, just below the surface, you know that you haven't. It is an unrealisable dream: a cop-out from living in the present.

And that, as I looked at the reflection of Central Park on Balloon Dog, is what I think Jeff Koons is saying. Although the work wasn't made specifically for the space, it somehow felt to me as if it had been. Koons might tell us that Balloon Dog is only there to make us happy, that it is a "celebration", but I don't believe him. Koons is from the school of Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí (his teenage hero and reason for moving from Pennsylvania to New York, where Dalí was living at the time).

Koons knows his Freud and understands the tricks our minds play, both conscious and unconscious. By making a massive, surreal dog – sunny, supposedly innocent, something that you can't fail to like – Koons knows that it will start to play with your insecurities. He knows what I know – that Balloon Dog won't make me happy. And while I also know that it's made of stainless steel, I can't quite escape my irrational childhood fear that at any moment, it could burst.

THE GUARDIAN