Art by Jeff Koons

Koons makes deliberately shiny, kitsch-adjacent sculptures out of expensive materials, most famously his Balloon Dog series, giant stainless-steel forms polished to a mirror finish that mimic the look of a cheap twisted balloon animal, treating mass, low culture and high-end craftsmanship as if there's no real tension between them. His 2019 sculpture Rabbit sold at auction for $91.1 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. Decades earlier, his explicit "Made in Heaven" series, made with his then-wife, Italian pornographic actress and politician Ilona Staller (known professionally as Cicciolina), generated real controversy for how directly it mixed fine-art ambition with pornography.