I think the move has been great for Jerry. His articles have become sharper and on point without falling into a reactionary stance. Jerry is honing in on the academy week by week and his criticism is getting stronger and more exciting. This week he takes on Murakami & Gagosian and hints at an art world undercurrent that hasn't quite formed yet - in the show Underdog at the same gallery. This says to me that he's actively looking for something new, and he may be willing to suspend his own well formed tastes in order to find it.

There is some excellent writing in this piece. I loved reading this..."It’s wonderful that more artists are making more money from their work. Without the market, the art world would be a pretty boring place. But this is a complete acquiescence to a world where gamesmanship, money, and hype are measures of success; where advisers sell art over the phone from JPEGs to collectors who imagine they’ll enter art history by spending exorbitantly. Meanwhile, auction houses cheer them on. Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, says of the mad prices, “It’s a new world.” Actually, it’s just the old one of cash, carry, and entitlement, speeded up." In a paragraph Jerry encapsulates the excesses of this top down climate and gives us the real scoop on the empty work that we keep on seeing. And in a great polemical judo flip at the end of the section turns Warhol around on Murakami and the rest of the POMOs.

In discussing the group show "Underdog" also at Gagosian we hear Jerry's restless heart
"...By now the messiness, appropriation, and abstraction of “Underdog” are so common and system-approved that they’re beginning to signal emptiness and cliquishness instead.
In some ways, “Underdog” is simply what frustration and ambition look like now. The show is so up-front about its in-groupness and back-scratching, however, that you begin to understand that these conditions are effective ways to draw polemical lines in the curatorial sand, to circle the wagons against dubious tendencies. “Underdog” will seem dated in a year, but right here, right now, its polemics, tribalism, and gang tactics—as cynical and annoying as they threaten to become—are what it may take to move beyond the pranksterism of artists like Murakami."
Jerry recognizes that this rockstar-guitar-smashing-anti-establishment salvo is steeped in reactionary academic dogma, but without a new opposing vision what else can be done? The pragmatic truth is that Gagosian's approach to showing art has little programmatic necessity - he is a dealer of blue chip artists rather than an instigator of a specific aesthetic. His tastes are catholic and there is little continuity or reasoning (outside of success) in his choices of artists - a POMO dealer in a POMO art world. Gagosian can afford to show art and antiart together - they remain untouchable and sellable.

If Jerry continues I think we'll start to see a bit of visual space opening up. In the words of David Hockney"...Exciting times lie ahead!"