A persona that floated above reality

As Jackson’s fame reached stratospheric levels, all the grit, the abrasions, and the dragging weight we associate with real life seemed flushed out of him, and he attained a kind of hovering, artificial aura that chimed with his much-invoked Peter Pan syndrome, his stupendous revenues, and the impression he gave of levitating even above the law.

We knew a tragedy (and not just his) underwrote all this. But the artificiality went so fantastically high on the dial that there was an inescapable element of comedy, too - as if you couldn’t even talk about Jackson without sucking in helium first.

When, in 1988, Jeff Koons presented a sculpture (made by others, but conceived and overseen by him) called “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,’’ he was invoking all this - and especially the weightlessness (just as he had in his earlier series of basketballs suspended in watery vitrines).

Whatever you think of Koons, the work, in porcelain painted gold and white, was undoubtedly one of the funniest of its time. It was so glittering, so smooth, and so hygienic: It seemed to perfectly encapsulate Milan Kundera’s famous definition of kitsch as “the absolute denial of [excrement].’’ It invoked, too, the weightless spirit of the Rococo - all those pink-cheeked nymphets and baby blue skies - and its associations with the doomed Ancien Régime of the 18th century.

At the time, in the realm of so-called “high art,’’ the dominant styles were cool minimalism and hot neo-expressionism. Just about no style seemed more antithetical to the period than Rococo.

But Koons dared to survey life beyond the art world - a Hollywood actor as president, a superstar singer who posed for the cover of his album with tiger cubs - and saw Rococo kitsch everywhere. It was just so perfect that Jackson’s chimpanzee was called Bubbles. What could be more pristine - and more unsustainable - than a bubble? SEBASTIAN SMEE