As a matter of engineering, there is nothing left to say of the historic touchdown of the Intuitive Machines spacecraft Odysseus on the lunar surface earlier this year—the first-ever commercial moon landing that could be called a success.
As a matter of the humanities, however, the conversation has only just begun. Among the items of the Odysseus payload—between the usual affair of laser retroreflector arrays and lidar devices—is a sculpture about one foot across, entitled Jeff Koons: Moon Phases, by artist Jeff Koons. It is, Koons claimed, the first “authorized” artwork on the moon.
No moon art authority exists, but an Intuitive Machines representative told Scientific American that the company authorizes the payloads that fly on its landers and that it formally authorized that Jeff Koons: Moon Phases was in compliance with Air Force Space Command Manual 91-710, also known as the Range Safety User Requirements Manual, and part 400 of Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which meant the artwork was safe to launch. We disregard here the artworks hand-carried to the moon by the Apollo astronauts of the late 1960s and early 1970s because some doubt those items were strictly “authorized” (as all real art is).
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Intuitive Machines did not donate the space for the artwork, which is installed as a static fixture on the lander’s exterior. Instead, according to the company, Patrick Colangelo of NFMoon and Chantelle Baier of 4Space “initiated” the project, and nonfungible token (NFT) platform Pace Verso “presented” it. The whole thing, flown for an undisclosed sum, is tied to an arrangement involving NFTs—cryptocurrency-adjunct digital identifiers that represent “ownership” of an object. Regardless of how financiers booked its passage, the point is Jeff Koons: Moon Phases is on the moon, and there are implications for everybody.
Koons, who got his start on Wall Street as a commodities broker, has a studio that employs a small platoon of assistants who make his sculptures. He’s more of a big-picture “ideas” man, consistent with the broader movement of contemporary artists in recent decades extolling the notion that skill is artificial and that the handmade is passé: ideal, perhaps, for the masses, but not for what poet Catulle Mendès approvingly described as the “charming aristocracy” of taste, to whom art now belongs.
Koons’s most famous work is entitled Balloon Dog. It is a series of five stainless-steel balloon dogs. His second most famous piece is entitled Rabbit. It is a stainless-steel rabbit. His third most famous piece is entitled Bouquet of Tulips. It is a—you get the idea. In 2016 he angered artists and officials in the city of Paris when he donated Bouquet of Tulips to the city, and the government had to figure out what to do with it. Koons’s pieces can routinely sell for more than $50 million.
Jeff Koons: Moon Phases is a translucent box containing 125 one-inch stainless-steel moons that each correspond to our natural satellite’s various phases from different vantage points on Earth and are engraved with the name of a famous person in our planet’s history. Each moon has a collectible NFT, which Koons’s website describes as “cultivating connections between the digital and physical worlds.” His assistants are also making a larger version of each stainless-steel moon, into which they will press precious stones marking the place where Odysseus made moonfall: the “lunar heritage site” and “permanent art installation” of Jeff Koons: Moon Phases.
While that may sound grandiose, if anything it underplays the significance of the spot and the sculpture. Jeff Koons: Moon Phases will likely survive longer than every single work of art in the Louvre and possibly the human race itself.
Earth’s surface is a harsh place for works of art. What fires don’t destroy, floods or landslides may have their way with. Single missiles in wartime can erase entire museums. So, too, can extremist governments. Earth’s crust is constantly recycling itself. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes—all cause destruction. The best we can do is prolong the life of our great works, but nothing lasts forever. Today the oldest piece in the Louvre is a 9,000-year-old statue out of the circa 300 millennia that humans have walked Earth—not to mention the multimillion-year history of our now extinct fellow tool-using bipedal hominins.
But what’s the likely lifespan of artificial objects on the lunar surface, where there is no fire, no weather and no war?
“Longer,” says Kirby Runyon, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute and CEO of Planetary Experience Consulting (Planex), an educational space tourism company, “a lot longer: tens of millions of years. But they don’t last forever.”
For the masterpieces of Auguste Rodin on Earth to outlast the output of the assistants of Jeff Koons on the moon, the few fracturing forces on the lunar surface would have to act hard and fast, but even then, in the end, it would take a big rock to do the dirty work.
Everything on the moon endures an unfiltered onslaught of ultraviolet light from the sun, which will bleach all paint, pigments and inks. Runyon says that the American flags from the six Apollo missions that landed on the moon have probably faded white at this point. That happens in a matter of decades. Coronal mass ejections from the sun slamming into the moon, meanwhile, will pelt artifacts with particulate showers of protons and electrons. “Those might darken the surface a little bit, but they’re not gonna do much more than that,” he says.
There is also thermal cycling. The surface of the moon varies from 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) in daytime to –250 F (–157 degrees C) at night, with each half of its diurnal period taking two Earth weeks. “It’s not like [a freeze-thaw cycle] because there’s no water there to break things apart, but when things warm up, they expand, and when things cool down, they shrink,” Runyon says. “And just that cycling back and forth will break things down”—especially when it repeats across eons, as it does on the moon.
Meanwhile cosmic rays—ionized atomic nuclei expelled by exploding stars, feasting black holes and other exotica of extreme astrophysics—can slowly erode and destroy materials at the molecular level, regardless of whether that material is DNA, plastic, pigment or steel. Those forces, however, take much longer to break things down than the real scourge of the lunar surface: micrometeorites.
“For something like sculptures, the number-one culprit for destruction is going to be micrometeorite bombardment, where you have grains of dust impacting at several tens of miles per second,” Runyon says. Planetary scientists can estimate the effects of micrometeorites by studying lunar boulders—or the lack thereof. “A lot of times, we can see the tracks of boulders running up hillslopes. We know their sizes and where they came from. But then where the boulder is today, sometimes it’s not a boulder anymore. It looks like it just gave up the ghost and disintegrated into a pile of rocks. It could be the constant rain of micrometeoroids breaking things down.”
A given boulder on the moon can only survive for 10 million to a few tens of millions of years, Runyon says. And nothing is immune to this. In 50 million years, the Eagle lander that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will be little more than aluminum pumice and Kapton flecks.
Had the Odysseus lander touched down and remained upright, Jeff Koons: Moon Phases would last no longer than that before micrometeorites pounded it into the regolith. But when it touched down, Odysseus tipped over—with the artwork on the bottom. The entire spacecraft is shielding the sculpture, giving it a few million years of extra life.
“Of course,” Runyon says, “a large impactor could land nearby and completely obliterate it or cover it with meters worth of regolith and ejecta. That could destroy it in short order, but barring that, it’s gonna be micrometeorites [that destroy it], and it’s going to take a really long time.”
Laura J. Lawson, an interdisciplinary impresario whose artwork explores the relationships between the humanities and space science, offers an artist’s take on Koons, humanity’s emergent cultural liaison with the known universe.
“Part of the disdain around him involves the question of the deeper human connection in his work,” she says. “Is he just making things that are showy and expensive? Is he making things for shock value? A lot of artists come from a place of wanting a genuine human connection with one another. He seems maybe to not care about that on the surface.”
Studying images of the work, Lawson gives credit to the project where she feels it is due. “Each moon has the names of celebrated artists—that’s pretty thoughtful of him to include,” she says. “And with each little moon globe, to see what the moon looks like from Earth—that’s not an experience you can have on the moon, and it is kind of clever to have this trade of perspectives.” She questions the manufactured quality of Jeff Koons: Moon Phases, however. “I don’t think all art has to be handmade in order to be art—I certainly work with fabricated materials,” Lawson says. “But I think if we’re really trying to share a human perspective, it would be great to show things that we make with our hands.” The lander itself is already a testament to our laser precision and engineering prowess, she adds.
“I’d love to see art on the moon a little more flawed, something showing that humans are squishy and resourceful. Something that shows we started out with just handprints on cave walls,” she says.
And perhaps in the coming years that art will arrive on the lunar surface. Alice Gorman, an associate professor at Flinders University in Australia, who specializes in space archeology, says, “With the democratization of access to space, I love that someone can think, ‘I wanna send my child’s watercolor paintings to the moon’ and then actually do so.” Myriad missions to the moon will lead to an “absolutely random mishmash of things” going up there, she adds, and in aggregate, they might paint a more accurate picture of our messy species than something like the Voyager Golden Records, which only showed us at our very best.
Still, without the rigid and formalized process that decided the Golden Records’ music, images and multilanguage greetings, the things we send to the moon could eventually be worse than modern art.
“What if somebody decides to send Mein Kampf?” Gorman asks. “When those kinds of objects get sent to the moon as well, how does that change the way we do things?” On one hand, if space is for all humanity, then it’s for the humans we don’t like as much as the ones we do. “How can we say you don’t have a right to send your abhorrent, racist, misogynist shit up there?” Gorman says. “I don’t know—I don’t have answers to any of this. I just think we need to keep an eye on it.”
Ultimately, she explains, launch decisions will fall to the nations to whom commercial launchers and landers belong. “Under the [United Nations’] Outer Space Treaty, the launching state is responsible for everything that one of their members sends up. Nobody’s really paying any attention to this at the moment, but at some point, somebody is gonna send something up that is horrible. And we’re gonna have to deal with that in ethical terms.”
It will be a hard conversation that the human race has with itself—which is precisely why the humanities will be such a vital force as we forge ahead with our lunar ambitions. The moon, Gorman says, is still pure in some way: the same unsullied orb that beguiled our ancestors. “But it’s changing rapidly,” she adds, “and the way we think about it is changing rapidly.”
What isn’t changing are the condition of the things we land there. Epochs from now—long after humankind has evolved into some strange new form or abandoned Earth for some galactic Avalon or eradicated itself with weapons of war—something alive from someplace else might find the world we once called home.
Perhaps these celestial explorers will unearth ruins of what once was New York City, reduced now to scattered, broken slabs and shards, beyond which, in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, “round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” Perhaps they’ll wonder what happened and who we were and search for clues on our static moon.
There, still, will be the lunar heritage site and permanent art installation of Jeff Koons: Moon Phases.
Behold, within the decayed remains of its robotic keeper, its fallen temple: the last authorized art of those who held dominion over this long-fallen world! So revered were these tiny, etched, metallic orbs that its makers placed them beyond the caprices of volatile oxygen and violent wars, to be held, remote yet ever present, in the night sky upon the hallowed satellite that they so clearly celebrated.
What a piece of work we were, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and movement. Ah, the Moon Phases! Their splendor whispers of glory unfaded across the eons. So many globes, each offering a different perspective, each uniquely bearing some unknowable inscription of curious glyphs—one, however, is most prominent of all.
“Jeff Koons”: perhaps the name of our most sacred god.
Sic transit gloria mundi. If only they could have seen the balloon dog. If only they could have bought the NFT.