Peter Schjedahl on a perfect moment where art’s real function intersects with an attempt at analysis. Of course, Schjedahl knows exactly what to do:

I remember my first encounter, in Germany, in 1992, with Koons’s famous “Puppy,” the forty-three-foot-high Scottie dog enveloped in living flowers. As I was judiciously taking descriptive and analytical notes, a bus arrived bearing a group of severely disabled children in wheelchairs. They went wild with delight. Abruptly feeling absurd, I shut my notebook and took instruction from the kids’ unequivocal verdict.

from Funhouse: A Jeff Koons Retrospective, The New Yorker, June 9 & 16, 2008