Jeff Koons’s ‘Seated Ballerina’ May Have Been, Um, ‘Appropriated’

Koons based the 45-foot-tall inflatable, currently installed at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, on his 2015 stainless-steel sculpture of the same name. It turns out that both of them bear the proverbial striking resemblance to a porcelain titled Balerina Lenochka by Oksana Zhnikrup and the The Kiev Experimental Ceramic-Art Factory. (A Koons representative has subsequently claimed that he copied Zhnikrup’s work “under license”; no details of this license were provided.)