You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter.
– Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol.

In 1917, when Marcel Duchamp walked into a hardware store on Fifth  and 17th, bought a porcelain urinal and tried to place it in an art show (failed; damn selecting committee rejected it), his funny idea created something more influential and enduring than readymades or conceptual art. That pisspot and its ultimate acceptance as art begat the art critic: the augur society trusts beyond its own common judgment to divine what art is and how it should be valued.

If you alter the Webster’s or whatever definition of “art” to something that no longer requires skill to create nor beauty as a purpose (like a urinal, or an inflatable toy fixed to a mirror), art loses its significance for a culture which for thousands of years has valued it for exactly those qualities… Unless that culture can be convinced that non-skilled, non-beautiful endeavors can indeed make art – they just need translators to convey their hidden aesthetic value.

Over recent generations the art world’s channels have become draped in the robes and incensed shadows of a venerated esoteria: priests and supplicants, the disposal of logic, embedded rituals, uncountable money. And its leaders and their customs have come to engender so much worldly faith that a work directly tied to Duchamp’s urinal can be valued at $12 million dollars of, I guess, Wall Street money, or tech money, oil money, or whatever. Society’s money. Twelve million dollars – which, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, equals 600 heart-lung machines or Steve McQueen’s Ferrari.

And thus we observe the blind faith by dollar amounts that have come to be invested in what critics tell us about items like a giant metal balloon dog ($58 million), a train set filled with bourbon ($33.8 million), or a saccharine pig & angels tchotsky your grandmother might smile at ($1.9 million).

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It’s been said that Jeff Koons is the most reviled artist in the world. Sure, let’s grant him that. And if so, the reason for all that contempt is less the things he makes and “makes” (e.g., unaltered Nike posters framed and placed in a gallery) than the deeply troubling sums of money his not-beautiful art earns him, brokered by a critical chorus praising things like the “totemic quality, like high-tech Neolithic stones or temple sentinels” we ourselves might not see in vacuum cleaners displayed in Plexiglas, else we’d all get religion in the P.C. Richard, no doubt.

But reviled or not, the Whitney’s retrospective of Koons’s 35-year career has been one of the biggest comets to crash into the art world since Damian Hurst formaldehyded a shark. From fanboy to hater there hasn’t been a critic worthy of his pedestal who hasn’t declared at least a couple of masterpieces, or hundreds, as if Koons spat them from his mouth like rivets in his 125-worker factory in Chelsea.

Despite the colorful fun of Koons’s work, and whether you agree with the lovers or the haters, it’s obvious Koons is an adept player in what Robert Hughes called contemporary art’s “cruddy game of self-aggrandizement for the rich and the ignorant.” But the Whitney show has shepherded not only the art world with its wagging bells; the wide public, too, has shown up to ooh and ogle and giggle their way through an actually likable exhibit that, like a slick summer movie, provides a respite from any emotional and intellectual effort. Me? I entered with dread, but left having enjoyed. (Future epitaph?). Wandering through goofy kitsch, shiny, oversized knickknacks, funhouse mirrors, an enormous palette of pastels and occasional tasteless smut isn’t an unpleasant way to spend half an afternoon, as long as you can keep your mind off the underpinning of disturbing economics.

I watched comers and goers at the show – the non-rich and the non-ignorant (I take it Hughes was referring to the special kind of stupidity that excessive affluence creates) – and everyone was having a fine ol’ time. Even some of my own cynicism melted, as I allowed Koons’s jokes to tickle me. There’s some funny shit in there. A plasticy-looking pipe organ Hulk? A lonely Pink Panther embracing a naked mermaid? Gretchen Mol as Betty Page straddling a dolphin and kissing some orange blow-up thing? Almost LOL-worthy, some of Koons’s bits. And what about all that reflective mirror-art? Don’t we all just love art we can take selfies in?

But…still…there’s the trifle of that $58 million paid for a balloon dog that – get a load of this – is actually made of metal, not balloon! Cool, dude! I wonder if George Carlin, say was ever paid $58 million for one of his jokes that cut conventional perspective a new one. And if he had been, what would other comedians feel about him? Not to mention men and women struggling to keep their family’s heads above the fast-rising waters of an unaffordable economy while the rich, the ignorant and Jeff Koons just get richer.

Koons is an adept player in what Robert Hughes called contemporary art’s “cruddy game of self-aggrandizement for the rich and the ignorant.”

Buzzkill, man.

…And that’s the conversation you overhear at the Whitney (unless you were among those invited to the opening gala; I’m guessing you weren’t): men and women enjoying the playful shtick, happy to be photographing themselves among it, but again and again banging into the jaw-dropping, maddening absurdity of Koons’s little jokes as indecently-valued…things…that imply either the deep stupidity of those who see no such value in them, or the deep-pocketed stupidity of those who do. But the problem isn’t just that some rich doofus is wasting tens of millions of circulating currency on an oversized gag; and it’s not even that the $58 million for that big red balloon dog spent with a better heart toward better ends could’ve built a first-rate elementary school where one doesn’t exist, say.  Maybe the greatest long-run social cost from the hyper-elevated eco-artistic status of Koons and his ilk is the distortion of cultural value, the social displacement of faith. This isn’t a world slap-happy from an overabundance of those qualities.  They’re rare enough, and when they get misplaced, someone more deserving gets robbed. A lot of people do, actually, because society’s path toward the valuable and the credible becomes further skewed from a proper, constructive course.

And so we circle back to the agents of the trade, the critics. That same clan who convinced us that Warhol’s (along with Duchamp, one of Koons’s daddies) repetition-after-repetition of unskilled work had great artistic value – and who now tell us that Koons is, as he himself says, a genius; “the signal artist of today’s world” with “no end of talent,” ”the most potent and inventive artist of this mad, frothy era” who’s been “churning out some of the most incredible sculptures in the history of art.”  And even critics who see no artistic value in his work see so much more than just a lack of art – i.e. they catch the whiff of an abomination — that his “bad boy” image only gets burnished, shining all the more brightly for the rich and the doofus.

But I have to wonder: what if all the critics had panned Koons’s work early on? Had told him to cork his ideas in a bottle and toss it in the Hudson because, sorry kid, framing unaltered Nike posters doesn’t display enough creativity, intelligence or empathy to make art? And what if Koons had gone on anyway to produce his oversized knick-knacks, fake inflatable rafts, fake Play-Doh?

I’ll tell you what – Jeff Koons would be the most loved artisan in the world today, that’s what. He and his factory make some great stuff, there’s no doubt about it. I bet you anything his reflective silver rabbit could go for, like, $500! Maybe he could even get a grand for that Michael Jackson and Bubbles tchotchke – I’m not kidding! Dude could earn serious coin selling all his cool, oversized gewgaws at arts and crafts fairs, Christmas bazaars, swap meets… No, wait – Home Shopping Network! Tell me Jeff Koons, non-artist, couldn’t make bank from fake porcelain poodles on HSN. I’d buy one of those for my mom! He could spit them out in his factory. And the critics wouldn’t even know who he was. But we would. Because that big metal balloon dog is some pretty cool shit.