"Stefan Edlis, a celebrated Chicago collector and retired plastics executive, is also parting with a valuable Koons sculpture next month. On May 13, Christie’s is selling “Jim Beam J. B. Turner Train,” a 1986 stainless-steel train nine and a half feet long filled with bourbon. Mr. Koons saw a plastic and porcelain version of the train in the window of a liquor store and cast it in steel. The train was part of “Luxury and Degradation,” an exhibition at International With Monument Gallery in SoHo that examined shallowness, excess and the dangers of luxury in the high-flying 1980s."
So, the 1980s, with a Republican President Ronald Reagan, exhibited "shallowness, excess and the dangers of luxury." Presumably, one is supposed to infer conversely that the 1990s under Democrat Bill Clinton exhibited deepness, restraint, and either safety of luxury or dangers of paucity.
Hence, the convenient moral bookkeeping, GHWBush lost his job b/c he oversaw an economic recession. Bill Clinton was good b/c he was in office during a good economy, or at least the stock market did well under his tenure. However, Ronald Reagan is evil b/c he turned the US economy around from the malaise of Jimmy Carter. If you fail, and you're a Republican, like Bush, you're a failure. However, if you succeed, like Reagan, it doesn't count b/c winning is only good if Democrats can coopt credit. Lastly, if you fail and you're a Democrat, like Obama, you scapegoat Republicans for breathing oxygen on planet earth and seek to remedy the situation by regulating the carbon dioxide they exhale.
In case you wondered what the fuss was about, a link to the teetotaller train from Richard Spillett's 11 April 2014 "Daily Mail" article "Art worth more than £200 MILLION including works by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock and a stainless steel train filled with Jim Beam bourbon to go under the hammer"
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