Jeff Koons (b. 1955) rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists exploring the meaning of art and spectacle in a media-saturated era. Beneath their captivating exteriors, his luxurious icons and elaborate tableaux make use of conceptual constructs—including the ancient, the everyday, and the sublime—to engage the viewer in a metaphysical dialogue with cultural history. Koons also draws attention to the continuity of images as they pass through time, combining vernacular images and objects with art historical references, from common consumer products and mass media representations to symbols of sexuality and transcendence. In Waterfall Couple (Dots) Blue Swish with Red Stroke (2009), the visceral physicality of a couple embracing is mediated by multiple digital interventions, rendering the erotics of the image imperceptible, fully distorted into pixelizations and overlapping painterly marks that behave as if they are layered on a digital screen. Here, Koons dramatizes the ways in which digital technologies (and by default, the implied future) has created vast representational distances in our interpersonal relationships, exposing the banality of such explicit imagery and rendering it literally and figuratively abstract.