Christie's LTDArt & PhotographyNewsJeff Koons’ Rabbit just broke the record for a living artistThe shiny steel sculpture sold for £71m, beating the amount set by David HockneyShareLink copied ✔️May 16, 2019Art & PhotographyNewsTextPatrick Benjamin Is there anything more illustrative of the vast inequality in the world than the global art market? When someone decides to buy a shiny steel Rabbit for almost $100m, you’d have to argue, no. Jeff Koons, the American postmodernist that everybody loves to hate, has seen his 102cm sculpture “Rabbit” sell for $91.1m (£71m) in a record-breaking fee for a living artist. The piece was sold at a Christie's in New York for more than $20m (£15m) over its asking price to a buyer in the audience, who is yet to be identified. The auction house described the item on their website as "cute, sinister, cartoonish, imposing, vacuous, sexy, chilling, dazzling and iconic". Koons – who once referred to stainless steel (his preferred working material) as “pure sex” and found as a child that looking at a cereal box was a “kind of sexual experience” (been there) – rose to prominence in New York’s art scene in the 1980s, and his brand of glossy, sickly-sweet, bubble-sculpture has divided opinion in the art world ever since. His “cheap, tonedeaf, misogynistic images” (The Guardian) have been dismissed as “Baloney” by the New York Review of Books and labelled “repulsive” by the art writer Rosalind Krauss. Not that any of this seems to bother Koons or Christie’s all that much, with a – to be fair, brilliant – ad campaign launched in the run up to the sale that confronted all of these criticisms head on. The previous record for a living artist was set by David Hockney in November 2018 after a fierce battle between two phone-in bidders saw “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” fetch £70m. Read our piece here explaining why the art world loves to hate Jeff Koons. Watch the moment Jeff Koons’s ‘Rabbit’ sets a new #WorldAuctionRecord for a work by a living artist. https://t.co/3ZWvCzUDANpic.twitter.com/ToKxCpzUK6— Christie's (@ChristiesInc) May 16, 2019Expand your creative community and connect with 15,000 creatives from around the world.READ MOREThe Renaissance meets sci-fi in Isaac Julien’s new cinematic installationMagnum and Aperture have just launched a youth-themed print saleArt Basel Paris: 7 emerging artists to have on your radarInside Tyler Mitchell’s new blockbuster exhibition in ParisAn insider’s portrait of life as a young male modelRay Ban MetaIn pictures: Jefferson Hack launches new exhibition with exclusive eventArt to see this week if you’re not going to Frieze 2025Here’s what not to miss at Frieze 2025Portraits of sex workers just before a ‘charged encounter’Captivating photos of queer glamour in 70s New YorkThis erotic photobook archives a decade of queer intimacyGuen Fiore’s tender portraits of girls in the flux of adolescence