Jeff Koons, Pink Panther, 1988. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Gerald S. Elliott Collection. Photo © MCA Chicago

I feel the same way about Jeff Koons as I did about learning to play the flute.

When I was in the fourth grade, we all had to try out for band. I wanted—with the dramatic flair and desperation of a ten-year-old—to play the saxophone. Our male octogenarian band teacher told me that “girls don’t play the saxophone” (this was pre-Simpsons, not that Lisa could have persuaded him), and he handed me a flute instead.

I hated the flute. I hated its shrill squawks and breathy squeaks. I hated its long, skinny, silver body, the way it jutted unnaturally out from my side. My parents were mysteriously determined that I keep it up, and even paid for private lessons over the summer. My teacher—the same octogenarian who denied me the saxophone—would show me a few notes, and then say, “I’m from Missouri. Missouri is the ‘Show Me’ state. So show me how to do this!” I’d sigh and coax a rusty braawwwwk out of my instrument. Out of hatred and frustration and spite, I didn’t just stop practicing, I stopped learning altogether. I pretended to learn the C-major scale and pretended to play “Mr. Whole Note Takes a Walk.” I moved my fingers around the flute’s body, pursed my lips, and pretended to blow air across the mouthpiece. When we had our fourth grade band concert that year, I was a flautist Milli Vanilli in our little band room.

Koons’ work is forced upon me nearly every time I go to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I shudder when I see his sculptures in the same inevitable way I shuddered when I was told I would be learning to play the flute. Like that damn flute, I find Koons’ work shrill and squawky, brash and indecipherable. Maybe it’s because he’s an artist known for appropriating images of pop culture, and I’m a person known for having a low pop culture IQ. Maybe it’s because I have no appreciation for garish neo-pop colors on smooth reflective surfaces, or for stacks of old Hoover vacuum cleaners set atop bare florescent tubes. Maybe I just prefer saxophones.

But there’s still a sculpture that catches my eye, whether I want it to or not, every time I see it on display at the MCA. Jeff Koons’ Pink Panther is one of the their signature pieces, and I go there somewhat frequently, so I’ve looked at this sculpture a lot. It taunts me from across the gallery, exposing the indignation and world-weariness of my inner ten-year-old. If it could talk, it would take the same cheeky tone as my band teacher telling me to show him, and I would roll my eyes the same way I did as twenty years ago. But I now have wisdom beyond ten years, so instead of shutting my brain off to it, I’ve tried, however grudgingly, to open it up.

The porcelain Pink Panther is not quite life-sized, but it’s certainly too big to ignore. A woman—a mermaid, maybe, though we can’t tell for sure—stands bare-breasted and looks over her right shoulder. She’s a blond bombshell modeled after actress and sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, and she glances up with the perfect expression of innocence and experience. Her right hand covers her right breast, and the Pink Panther covers her left. She’s clasping him to her chest like a child might hold her stuffed animal, his head looking over her shoulder with a sad expression, his right paw and tail seductively wrapped around the woman’s back—a disconcerting combination of youth and sexuality. It’s interesting, too, that this piece is called Pink Panther—arguably the more absurdist side of this sculpture—and not Mermaid or Blonde Bombshell. The painted porcelain is kitschy and shiny and bright, and it smacks of 80s excess and ostentation.

But despite my distaste for this kitschy provocateur, and despite the discomfort it provokes in me, trying to step back and look at it—not just letting it torment me from across the gallery—forces me to do more than lipsynch the notes to the strange tune that is contemporary art. New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman writes that “beauty is often where you don’t expect to find it… it is something we may discover and also invent, then reinvent for ourselves…” Of course we often don’t find beauty what we don’t understand, but sometimes it’s still worth trying to understand what we don’t find beautiful.