Guided Talks
Jeff Koons: “Venus” του Lespugue

The “Venus of Lespugue” constitutes an enigma.

Essentially, the only thing we know for certain is that someone decided to represent the female body in a particular way, with the intention to communicate a message. What is certain is that they succeeded as this form continues to engage, circulate, and inspire to this day.

In this session, we will attempt to discover possible interpretations to the mystery and trace the trajectory of the representation of the female body – from Paleolithic materials to the polished stainless steel of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Venus.

With the dialogue between these works as both the starting point and the conclusion of this journey, we will seek to bridge the vast chronological gap that separates them, exploring manifestations of “Venus” across the entire spectrum of human creation: from poetry and music to sculpture, painting and architecture.

Bio

Paris Mexis is a set designer, director, creative director, and radio producer. He works in the performing arts, communication, and advertising sector, both in Greece and internationally.

Alongside his primary artistic activity in opera, theater, dance, television, and cinema, he creates and develops communication strategies with an emphasis on culture, and designs book covers, music albums, exhibitions, installations, and happenings.

Jeff Koons’ Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange) functions as an unusual laboratory for studying the regimes of the image that run through the long duration of art history.

The tiny Paleolithic figurine that served as its model was a portable object of intense symbolic charge within the hunter-gatherer societies of the Upper Paleolithic — a form that condensed conceptions of the body, reproduction, and social survival.

The lecture, in the form of an interactive visit to the space and (with) the exhibits, proposes that we view this transformation as an example of a broader archaeopolitics of the body: a process through which prehistoric forms are reactivated in the present, generating new meanings around sexuality, desire, materiality, and public display. In this context, the Balloon Venus becomes an object that speaks not only about prehistory, but about the ways in which the past continues to be constructed within the visual economies of contemporary culture.

Dimitris Plantzos, Professor of Classical Archaeology (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

Dimitris Plantzos is a classical archaeologist. His scholarly interests include ancient Greek art, archaeological theory, and modern receptions of classical antiquity. His books published in Greek include Greek Art and Archaeology 1200–30 BC (Kapon Editions, 2016), The Art of Painting in the Ancient Greek World (Kapon Editions, 2018), The Archaeologies of the Classical (Editions of the Twenty-First, 2014), and The Recent Future (Nefeli Editions, 2016). In 2026, his new book It Happened in Athens: Archaeology, Heritage, Urban Transformations will be published by Editions of the Twenty-First. He teaches classical archaeology at the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

 Despite various theories, we really don’t know the purpose the paleolithic “Venus” figurines may have served.  What we do know is that they were not “art,” “objects of aesthetic appreciation,” since these are modern categories, at most a few hundred years old.

Does removing the figurines from museums of anthropology to an art museum, next to a contemporary work of art, help?  Does Balloon Venus Lespugue by Jeff Koons help us understand and appreciate them better?  But since we don’t really know what “a work of art” is and the purpose of Koons’ work itself isn’t clear, could we use the distant past to understand our present?

We will ask if the ancient figurines are works of art even if they were not created for that purpose, whether we can appreciate an object’s beauty if we don’t know what it is.  There are more questions than there are answers here, but that is as it should be.  Beauty itself always leaves us with unanswered questions and incomplete understanding: that’s why we don’t want to let it go, and keep returning to it again and again.

Alexander Nehamas, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Alexander Nehamas is a philosopher. His scholarly interests include ancient Greek philoso-phy, aesthetics, the philosophy of art, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory. His books available in Greek include Nietzsche: Life as Literature, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, On Friendship, and Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates. Together with Paul Woodruff, he has also translated Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus into English. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton Uni-versity, where he held the Edmund N. Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professorship in the Hu-manities. Since 2018, he has been a full member of the Academy of Athens.