Jeff Koons’s giant blue egg sculpture—that outlandishly chatoyant and seductive object—looks as though it could have landed from another planet or another time. Its cracked top serves as a reminder of the way that Koons created a fundamental fracture within art history with his compelling work, and I was reminded of the artist’s monumental impact as I visited his exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler coinciding with the Art Basel fair, partly because it informed nearly everything I saw subsequently. The very first work in the show is the utterly eerie The New Jeff Koons (1980), a lightbox displaying an image of the artist as a young boy posing with crayons and a coloring book like the perfect child, his expression every bit the airy adult Jeff we have come to know: clear-eyed, polite and unnervingly serene, with his “how may I help you” smile. This image serves as an introduction to the artist’s brilliant Hoover sculptures and shampoo polishers in Plexiglas cubes, which revel in the purity of their box-fresh newness and aspirational product names—Celebrity and so forth, and assisted by Koons’s presentation and uncanny doublings. These, now more than thirty years old, are nothing short of visionary. They seem …

It was a profoundly disorienting encounter: in a room of Picasso paintings at the Fondation Beyeler, I suddenly came across a tall, muscled, black man in a pair of silver hot pants dancing silently and joyfully to music on his headphones. This go-go dancer atop a small, square white platform—both clubby stage and arty pedestal—was ringed by a crowd of silver-haired Swiss art patrons, dazzled and confused. If the white, incandescent bulbs that neatly rimmed the minimal stage alluded to the gay clubs (and their cultural politics), they also conjured the artist behind them, who turned ordinary strands of light bulbs into a series of now seminal contemporary art works—at once formalist and conceptual, poetic and political—in the 1980s and 90s. My encounter with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991), should not have caused such surprise; I was, after all, at the Beyeler to see the second stop of his retrospective, deftly organized by Elena Filipovic for the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. But such is the arresting power of the Cuban-born artist’s seemingly simple works and interventions that they nearly always cause a moment of both mental and physical frisson, even when one has seen them before. Such subjectivity …