Is that the Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog,” drunk on its own hubris and house party jungle juice, traipsing around the aisles of Target’s dorm room collection? We can’t be sure, since it’s doing its best “Animal House” impression with a lampshade on its head to obscure its true identity — but it better not be. Target’s new “Dog Balloon Lamp,” with its resemblance to an age-old birthday party favorite or an iconic blue-chip work of art — take your pick — may be prime bait to incur the ire of the intellectual-property-policing Koons and his army of lawyers.

Koons and his legal team, lest you forget, have intervened to block much smaller retailers from appropriating what he deems to be his unique signature design. In December of last year, his lawyers infamously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Park Life, a San Francisco gallery, for selling dog-shaped bookends that resembled his “Balloon Dog” sculpture. The legal intervention went nowhere, of course, and Park Life's lawyers made light of the case: “As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain.” Koons, whose metaphorical hide got a tanning from the media, decided against pursuing any legal action. Yet it may have been exactly the desire to prevent a wave of Koons-referencing knockoffs like the Target lamp that caused the artist's over-eager legal maneuver in the first place.

At any rate, the Park Life precedent means Target is likely safe, as long as they don’t make any references to the artist's name in selling this harmless bit of dorm room decor. If there was any doubt that someone at the big box retailer gets the play on the Koonsian aesthetic, well, when we ran across the “Dog Balloon Lamp,” it was displayed right next to another product: a heart-shaped coin bank, which resembles nothing so much as a riff on Koons's “Hanging Heart.”