Jeff Koons to Send Sculptures to the Moon

Jeff Koons is launching his sculptures into space. Following his acclaimed retrospective at Palazzo Strozzi last year, the 67-year-old American artist aims for the Moon, planning to turn it into an interstellar museum. This is happening with Moon Phases, a project recently announced in collaboration with Pace Gallery—the new gallery chosen to represent the sculptor after ending his partnership with longtime dealers Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner. The project is partly physical and partly digital, including a series of NFT works—Koons's first official NFTs, as he joins the crypto art trend. The works will be sold digitally on the Pace Verso platform, but only after their physical versions are sent to the lunar surface. Before the online NFT sale, the corresponding real sculptures will be shipped to the Moon to dock in Oceanus Procellarum, an area about 2,500 kilometers along the Moon's north-south axis. There, Koons's sculptures will be installed after a space journey departing from the Kennedy Space Station, NASA's base in Florida. The American artist could not have chosen a more spectacular way to debut in the world of non-fungible tokens.