Age: They don't make old bones. As they a) don't have bones and b) tend to burst if even lightly trodden upon.
Appearance: Dogs made of balloons.
Look at him! Isn't he cute! No, no. Don't look at him. Don't you dare look at him.
What? What? Why not? Because he doesn't belong to you, that's why not. He belongs to the pop artist Jeff Koons. Jeff Koons owns all balloon dogs.
I'm sorry, I've looked at that sentence in about 18 different ways now and it still makes no sense. Explain yourself forthwith. Jeff Koons made a sculpture of a balloon dog. His lawyers recently ordered the Park Life shop in San Francisco to stop selling bookends that look like balloon dogs. Ergo, Koons must believe he owns all balloon dogs.
That's bad news for children's entertainers and 1970s era Steve Martin. But have you thought that perhaps Koons is engaging in legal action as performance art – a scabrously ironic commentary on the impossibility of ownership in today's fragmented, multimedia, endlessly self-reflexive world. Wow. You have a lot of faith in Koons.
Well, otherwise it's hard to see how an artist who has made a living out of taking quotidian objects and other people's creations, remixing them and calling the results art would have the balls to do such a thing. Are you saying that someone who has benefited from the loopholes, flexibilities and grey areas of copyright law in the past . . .
And been sued many times for it in the process . . . shouldn't be allowed to try to protect his own work when someone may or may not have tried to play the same trick on him? What are you, some kind of communist?
No, just someone who can walk past neither a balloon animal or a suspected bubble of artistic arrogance and pomposity without wanting to prick it. Oo-er. Might want to mind yourself while you're at it, too.
Do say: "But is it art?"
Don't say: "No."
