As the autumn’s spate of openings wanes and the art world turns its eye from New York to London (and then Paris), Artforum’s editors sent Lydia Eliza Traill to track the change of seasons on each side of the pond, writing on the best and worst of the twin metropoles.
“New York is still very much the center of the universe,” an esteemed magazine editor told me in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. We had just descended from an apartment belonging to a resident who had lived in the hotel since the ’60s—a witness to its heyday of heroin, murder, and Joplin’s blowjobs. I now sat on the reupholstered couch in front of the concierge and watched a parade of platform Stan Smith trainers pass by. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t move to NYC; it literally has everything,” she continued. From the lobby, however, the ever-accelerating, terminal diminution of New York’s cultural currency, and its subsequent retreat into its own storied history, felt palpable.
Related
How will the New York art world survive this period of gentrified mediocrity? Will someone go bankrupt if Marc Kokopeli doesn’t continue to have a show here every three months? What is the cinema of transgression, and why do New Yorkers keep asking me if I went to Adam Friedland’s wedding? Would Gary Indiana have liked the John Waters sculpture of an oversize poppers bottle on display in Chinatown? Was New York’s art scene always in such a thrashing flurry to keep its head above water, and how many promising Cooper Union thesis shows were left unexploited when it succumbed and drowned in the murky abyss?
I began my trip with the two foremost shows of New York’s 9/11 memorial week: Thomas Ruff’s World Trade Center JPEGs at David Zwirner, and “Jordan Wolfson” at Gagosian, a show of AI-rendered Pixar animations of homosocial Desert Storm troop barracks and Cicciolina’s private parts. I continued my search for Great American Historical Art and Propaganda at the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster show of midcentury Americana, “Krasner/Pollock.” The exhibition seemed to bolster the theory that only the Cold War–era CIA could haveorchestrated AbEx’s meteoric rise, as the majority of the canvases pre-1952 resembled paltry experiments with mud.I’d been more drawn to Wolfson; his artistic process better captured the spirit of America: an overreliance on data centers and consumer tech, cloaked by the use of ingenuine mourning for a national tragedy. After seeing where the money was, I turned downtown to see where it wasn’t.
At a dive bar later in my trip, a fashion lecturer at Columbia asked an artist if “they had given up on art yet” and “when they would,” lest they be forced to reckon with the fact that they “still hadn’t made any money.” In London, it’s passé to appear as though one is trying to make money or, for that matter, to actually make money (which nobody does, in part because they’re already wealthy). This means that a work’s commitment to capitalist critique is less obviously flimsy than it is stateside, but also that lots of art out of London is fairly depressing: “Tasteful” solo shows at Raven Row, Cabinet, or the ICA London tend to imitate austere Kunstverein strategies, eschewing any interest in the extra-art zeitgeist. There’s been no equivalent to “Greater New York” in London, because outside of the emerging UK rap scene there’s no appetite for a nomenklatura. London’s best often find themselves showing at US institutions, those in London too mired in their old ways to figure out how to take advantage of the raw talent; take the likes of Josiane M. H. Pozi and Coumba Samba, Solomon Garçon or Ruth Angel Edwards and Chloée Maugile, all of whom were launched by smaller London enterprises and swiftly picked up for shows by US, not UK, institutions.
At the opening of “No Losers,” a collaborative exhibition organized by Jenny’s and Tenko Presents in Chinatown, a question ruined my evening: “You don’t know about Real Fine Arts?” I started to consider whether an equivalent gallery in London could acquire enough cult status to make an out-of-towner’s unawareness so intolerable. I dreamed of a London art scene capable of self-historicizing enough to force each successive generation to memorize its archive. The past thirty years of London’s equivalent of a “downtown” art scene remains relatively undocumented, memorialized in spoken word, out-of-print BANK magazine issues and Contemporary Art Daily. London only has Galerina, a single recent example of a gallery serving an intergenerational scene of like-minded artists (Morag Keil, Lolina, Dan Mitchell, Ewa Poniatowska, Gretchen Lawrence), but its influence and longevity remain to be seen. While the direct link uniting extant and defunct artist-run and artist-favorite spaces like Jenny’s and RFA or American Fine Arts was apparently obvious to New Yorkers, I still wish someone could have schooled me on what “downtown” means, yesterday, today, tomorrow, in a neat two thousand words. Then I would’ve had the help I needed to elucidate how the works on view in the Chinatown show—like Paul Levack’s photographs of dogs eating peanut butter—fit within the larger framework of the city’s supposedly storied and unending scene.
Several teenage girls slipped into the gallery space. They were still flush with pearlescent adolescence, and had gathered to look at spilled silicone ooze from an enlarged bottle of poppers labeled “RUSH.” It was unclear why they were here, considering the exhibition was a group show builtout of a very particular intergenerational gay-male scene. Then I remembered the show was being held at the office of No Agency—a downtown modeling agency—complete with an archive of Richard Kern Polaroids in the back room. What was it Lucy McKenzie said in her preface to Kern’s 2000 photobook Model Release? “At the time I had an eighteen-year-old-het-up-opportunism in me, and this was an exciting situation,” praising his photographs for their “unashamed naked lust over unperfect young girls.”
Later, at a reading at the project space Earth, I experienced a new feeling of disjuncture from my hometown, witnessing the awkwardness with which Myles Zavelo and Olivia Kan-Sperling (also an editor at this magazine) stood before a YouTube screensaver titled “Autumnal Vibes” and delivered improv riffs alongside an intermezzo. “Play ‘Runaway’!” an art student shouted, to a chorus of laughter. While the audience’s participation was jarring to a Brit, the resolve to launch a good-natured heckle at a reading was a welcome balance to the reservation, overproduction, or pompousness I’d come to expect from readings. Sometimes in contrast, it feels as if there is no playfulness within the London literati; it’s self-ironizing without the conviction to LARP, and self-important without belief. English readings can feel as though someone watched a New York reading, misremembered it, and then restaged it as a pantomime, more Alan Hollinghurst than Martin Amis.
Another thing New York undoubtedly has is a thespian fetish. Take the play De la Fourche au Four à la Fourchette, Broke the Plate by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, which I saw on a recent Friday at Amant in Williamsburg, a parody of post-Covid “back to the land” tendencies, whether in the form of farm-to-table consumption or environmentally conscious artist projects. At Amant—clearly a wealthy institution, but, as a recent resident told me, “not as wealthy as everyone thinks”—the two figures behind “No Losers” appeared onstage as actors. Jenny Borland, of Jenny’s, played a chef whose restaurant is founded on “relational aesthetics” and aspires to present a menu she calls a “thesis.” Tenko Nakajima Glenewinkel, of Tenko Presents, played a fictional front-of-house model-ceramicist. A palpable air of self-deprecation, self-satisfaction, and terrifying self-actualization underscores lines like: “This place is a summer camp for unemployed RISD kids who have to pretend to touch dirt.” The play oscillates between mocking pretension and exhibiting it.
Whatever New York is right now is crystallized in the idea of a play formed of art world cognoscenti riffing on pretentious restaurants, while showing esoteric gay-artwork nearby, and playing characters that mimic their real roles in the art world. An attitude of ready self-critique and perpetual mining of its own archive is what places the NYC art world in constant acceleration, and ahead of London. The question perpetually seems to be: how can we (gallery, artist, dealer, playwright, modelling agency) lampoon our own exclusivity? Can we then get away with it?