The artwork as labor-saving device

The great thing about Jeff Koons's new works at Gagosian is that you don't actually have to look at them. Thanks to the artist's new, improved system of hieroglyphics, it's enough to read these images, which is so much more efficient. There's a hieroglyph for female genitalia and another for landscape or rock or whatever. Messy zigzags and loops stand for painting itself—far be it from Koons to neglect this traditional medium—and benday dots stand for lots of things: the Pop Art heritage, the commercial media, mechanical reproduction and the ghost of Walter Benjamin. There's not much else to read here, and that's a relief. In today's busy world who wants to get bogged down in a novel? Even short stories are not short enough. Because Koons understands this, he gives us paintings we can grasp as quickly as ten-second spots on TV.