New! New Too! is one of only two large-scale lithographs created for Koons’s series The New, which is among his most critically acclaimed and influential bodies of work. The New otherwise comprises an unusual mix of pieces: an iconic array of Plexiglas vitrine–encased vacuum cleaners as well as two fluorescent lightboxes, one of which is emblazoned with the series title.

In the catalogue essay for Koons’s 1992–93 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, curator Brian Wallis writes, “what was striking about these works was their direct, and seemingly unquestioning, appropriation of banal consumer objects, the key features being that the objects were unused and that their newness (value) was undiminished.” Works from The New series are highly coveted by institutions and held in the collections of the world’s most prestigious museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Broad, Los Angeles; Tate, London; and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Koons first debuted works from this series in the street-facing windows of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Manhattan in May 1980. This unusual exhibition display, assuming the format of commodity products, was a clever nod to Andy Warhol’s window presentation for Bonwit Teller in New York nearly twenty years earlier.

In April 1961, Warhol installed five proto-Pop paintings as backdrops for women’s clothing; this knowing play on the adjacencies among the worlds of commerce and art would radically reroute the course of American art in the coming years as the 1960s Pop art movement exploded into the art world. Yet whereas Warhol’s presentation expressed ambiguity about art’s commodity status, as suggested by his hand-painted versions of advertisements and comic book imagery, Koons’s The New series signaled a new approach by consciously eroding the distinctions between art and commodity. Koons’s decision to take objects and images directly from the manufactured world, and to place them in museum windows using strategies of display for commercial goods, rather breathtakingly embodied the nouveau-riche fetishization of consumerism dominating the so-called “greed” decade during which these works were made.

New! New Too! features an example from a print advertising campaign for canned alcoholic cocktails by the brand The Club that were in circulation around 1983. The premise, replicated in Koons’s lithographic billboard, centers on two cans of tonic cocktails (one with gin, the other vodka) resting within a field of ice. Set against a crisp blue background, the scene takes on an almost glacial appearance, with the pair of beverages anthropomorphically serving as the ad’s protagonists, forever frozen in time.

Like Richard Prince’s isolation of advertising images for Johnny Walker whiskey in his contemporaneous rephotographs from the early 1980s, here Koons focuses on the short but thoroughly effective declaration of “New! New Too!” Notably, all the advertisement-based works in The New series contain the word “new,” as seen in New Rooomy Toyota Family Camry (1983). New! New Too! is the best-known and most important example of The New advertisements, having been exhibited in the highly influential 1986 exhibition Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object at the New Museum in New York, and most recently, in Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in 2018.