Hiji Nam around Manhattan – Artforum International

LAST FRIDAY AFTERNOON in David Zwirner, Benjamin Buchloh announced Gerhard Richter as the painter-heir to 20th century history. Then he added, “Will his paintings have lasting reverberations like the urinal? Probably not.” An ambivalent aperitif of a speech to kick off the evening. Later that night, on the corner of Petzel, Seth Price unveiled his large-scale paintings that impeccably blend 3D graphics, abstraction and AI-generated representation, in his first solo show in New York in five years, only the second time in nearly a decade he has exhibited new works. They looked small in the gallery’s new Chelsea space, which is big, grand, big, maybe too big to fail Or succeed. Then some seven hundred people were invited to the celebration at the Ukrainian National Hearth, where the banquet hall was flushed red and filled with fog machines. In a winding line, performers elbowed each other at the bar waiting to gorge on variations on the humble potato – latkes, pancakes, fries, with a bit of wilted salad.

Maybe it was because I ate too many potatoes, but honestly, I felt weighed down by a deep sense of inertia, like I was sewn into the stuffing. I thought back to being new to the art world and the invigorating feeling that there was something event here; there was this scene of people, and they all knew each other and had this history, this language. It was scintillating and seductive, brimming with a sense of camaraderie and conversational flow, always insular, meta-analytical and coded. On top of that there was always commerce and parties, but deep down it struck me as a community of seekers who believed the search was worthwhile.

Sitting there on Friday night, however, I couldn’t help but wonder who was the Seth Price of my generation, and who really cares? While Reena, Real Fine Arts and Jenny’s have been modeled after the Cologne School and American fine arts lineage, I (a cuspy millennial) sense little interest among Gen Z in carrying that torch. In a climate of increasing professionalization, sterilization, and consolidation of the art world, participating in mainstream cultural industry institutions is an increasingly thankless pursuit.

I often think that Price may have taken the pulse too well with his slippery, algorithmic brand of cool that seems to have foreseen the end of a specific kind of art world. When I ask him about generational changes, Price replies, “The Internet is probably finished, like cinema was, like the novel before that – I mean, they exist, but they become historical forms, they become academics, and young people get impatient with it and I want to do something else.

For better or worse, Zoomers don’t want to be broke, obscurely cool performers; they want to be wealthy, legibly cool entrepreneurs. This might explain why there were hardly any participants under the age of thirty. My favorite part of the evening was when Price took the stage to give a speech. “I would like to thank. . .” he started, before rocking and beatboxing as his words gave way to synthetic glitches and electronic oscillations, alongside music provided by Ergot Records’ Adrian Rew.

Saturday night, after dropping by Brooklyn to see Bill Hayden’s concise exhibition of paintings and drawings (soon to be shown at Federico Vavassori in Milan) at his home studio, I headed to the West Village for the opening of Henry Belden of violent, baroque and beautiful assemblages of sets at Bill Cournoyer’s apartment-gallery, The Meeting. Each piece evokes an exotic specimen imprisoned in a pool of resin – Marilyn Monroe with a black eye, Belden’s partner Kye Christensen-Knowles as a butterfly and a wind-up doll – like some soiled Wunderkammer. As it should be, Henry reads Alain Robbe-Grillet’s book A sentimental novel, an incestuous S&M tale; Kye reads Maurice Blanchot. (Even though books are increasingly historic technology at this point, the sex, taboos, and perversions of the human mind are timeless.)

Then, over a burger and drinks at Julius, Kye announced that he had received his first credit card. “Those bitches weren’t gonna give me one.” What are you supposed to do – you can’t have one because you never had one? A classic dilemma diagnosed by the “anti-psychiatric” psychiatrist RD Laing more than half a century ago, and symptomatic of the (art) world in general: You don’t have it / therefore you don’t deserve it / You don’t deserve it / because you don’t have it / You don’t have it / because you don’t deserve it / You don’t deserve it / so you don’t have it.

Later that night, with a slightly expanded contingent of Gen Z and sleazy internet personalities (Dimes Square models, Dasha Nekrasova, etc.), the same Friday downtown crowd gathered in a Midtown townhouse owned by Peter Currie’s family and hosted by arts consultant Jelena Kristic, for a party she co-hosted with Heji Shin and Charlotte Kidd. Despite the soft, romantic candles illuminating the three charming, creaky floors of the house and the tasteful art collection (some of them by artists in attendance), there was little movement or flow in the night, which remained somehow starchy and clumsy.

“You look bored,” Kye observed. “I know, because I often am too.”

And I was. It reminded me of a passage from Anaïs Nin’s diary in which she tells how to play a party scene for a Maya Deren film: “It remained empty and disconnected, a dance of shadows. . . Everything was warm, but did not spring from a passionate center, remaining peripheral. And there, under the lights, I saw the drama of our present life: nothing big enough, deep enough, strong enough. How to capture the void, or the superficiality, these ghostly figures which disappear on the screen as soon as they appear?

— Hiji Nam