Yo, fam! Are you vibin’ with Gen Z artist energy, or are you still wondering if you’re certified squad? No cap, it’s a whole new world, and we’re all about that woke life, flexin’ our skills, and living our truth. So spill the tea, bestie—are you the ultimate Gen Z artist slayin’ the game, or are you still leveling up? Dive into this lit quiz and see if you’re truly giving that main character Gen Z art life, skrrt! 🎨🔥

1. Your favorite place to chill is:

a) Myrtle-Wyckoff
b) Morgan Library and Museum
c) Rent-free in everyone’s head

2. Museums and art institutions are high-key:

a) Based
b) Cringe
c) Sus

3. Gagosian is:

a) G.O.A.T.
b) Skibbidy
c) Boomer

4. At art school you learn to:

a) Yeet paint on canvas
b) Simp for teachers
c) Secure the bag

5. MFA programs are for:

a) NPCs
b) Opps
c) Delulus

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6. On the Gram your grid got:

a) Rizz
b) Sauce
c) Drip

7. Art critique is all about:

a) Bussin vibes
b) Fire signs in the third house of Virgo
c) Dialectical materialism

8. The era of art you rep is:

a) Kai Cenat
b) Kaikai Kiki
c) Cobra Kai (2)

9. Biennial shows are:

a) Cheugy
b) Sick
c) Pluh

10. Your parents think your art is:

a) Heather
b) Mid
c) Dank

SCORES

10–16: Big yikes bruh, step up your game for the W. You are the face of Gen Z, but you are low-key slippin’ like a dusty millennial. Be extra, and serve realness. Erase the hate and show the world that you are fax no printer iconic. You finna make Jordan moves to get to that final boss glow-up or else you will get stuck catching hands from SDE side characters! Sheesh, you are probably a Gen X opp, sksksk. 🔪🚀

17–23: NGL, you touch grass and chill, tho maybe you need to flex and manifest hot girl, boy, or they vibes for a minute. You got swag, but FR, Gen Ys had their time to shine too, no cap. Hits different when you are the one thirsty for clout, deadass. So, while you stunt on the Gen Z art scene, snaps to the OGs who had to run so you could walk. While you stan them, remember to keep it hundo p yourself, gyat! 💯🔥

24–30: Everyone’s shook by your main character Gen Z gas. You were born to slaaay.  Your art is on fleek and your curator body count prob high AF. Shit gets real tho, so don’t forget self care to avoid a menty b. Right now your whole existence is sick and serving CEO lewks that’s leaving everyone on read and ded. Save some bussy for the rest of us, king. 💀😭

I lost the lease on my studio and can’t afford another in today’s market. There is half a room at home that I can take over, but it isn’t big enough to both work in and store all my art. My wife is suggesting that I have a sale on Instagram, but I don’t want to give the impression of being desperate or cheap. My only other option is to discard a lot of art since I don’t have space or money to keep it all anymore. The idea of doing this depresses me to no end. What should I do?

Your depression must be deeply debilitating because we are experiencing serious secondhand fatigue trying to gloss up an answer that won’t hurt your feelings. The loss of your studio has forced you to reckon with a chilling reality that every financially strapped creative spirit must eventually face: all art is landfill unless someone cherishes it. Love might be a lot to ask for, but, luckily, people, especially family members, also hold onto art because of guilt. Take solace in knowing that the canvases you don’t trash will eventually be the storage headache of your beloved wife or a grieving friend you appoint in your elaborate will.

Never forget that in the world of collecting, you are the biggest collector of your own art. No one has a collection as encyclopedic as yours. The problem with monopolizing your own market is that other potentially interested parties cannot consider its aesthetic, cultural, or financial value. We don’t know your background: perhaps you are represented by a gallery, and maybe your work has sold in the past. If so, you might be justified in not wanting to offer these works up as BOGO specials on your socials. That said, if you haven’t sold much work and are not currently (or ever) showing in galleries, it doesn’t feel like a fire sale would tank your career. Your pride may be knocked a little, but this could also open up a door, or at least reduce clutter.

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Has anyone ever said anything nice about your art? Congrats to them—now they get to own a piece of it. Share both the care and the burden with those who have bare walls and empty basements. Think of your family, friends, coworkers, colleagues, and acquaintances as your elite new patrons and benefactors. They won’t be paying for your work, but they will be saving you money that would otherwise get blown on storage and therapy bills.

I made a social media gaffe that is affecting my career. There was a thing going around about posting a photo of yourself at 21. My friend from college sent a picture of us at that age, so I put it on my X feed. We’re giving the thumbs-up sign while eating sandwiches outside a falafel restaurant. I swear I didn’t even notice the Israeli flag in the background. The blowback that this picture has provoked is troubling. People are accusing me of being an occupier, while others are cheering my patriotism! Two upcoming studio visits were canceled, and I was rejected by an art auction to support Gaza. It was an honest mistake and doesn’t represent how I feel about this humanitarian crisis. How do I get myself out of the conversation and back on track?

Your love of tahini, pickles, salad, and chickpeas has transformed your generously stuffed vegetarian pita into a blistering lamb meatball. You know what these two delicacies have in common? They both squirt out fluids that get all over your face and stain your shirt. You know what else is really messy? Life in 2024. Social media is capable of dredging up damning incidents from your past alongside new problems that can be sparked by offensive food posts and lame AF memes. This is the price we pay as a society for quick-like ASMR mukbang food videos, Leaning Tower of Pisa selfies, open-letter shares, and late-night thirst traps. Regardless of your affiliation, stop food blogging, and no more low-key virtue-signaling posts—both may unconsciously betray your disingenuous hunger for bipartisan hummus and nonbinary biennials. Consider the real pain of others in the world while keeping in perspective how much you are irritating some art people with your dumb posts.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

After the procedure continued for several days, Serra realized the task was meant to make both father and son feel better about one another—and that he would have moved that sand anywhere. This autopoietic account summarizes one of Serra’s most important contributions to the history of art: to recast sculpture as a single action carried through until completion, while probing the relation between form and action, as well as what it takes to initiate action. The last part he most explicitly addressed in film and video works (1968–79) that looked at the physiology of muscle reflex and the structures of communication systems, mass media, social justice, and labor organizing.

Much later, in 2001, Serra’s artwork was the first to enter Dia Beacon, when the former Nabisco factory building was undergoing transformation into a museum in Upstate New York. Interior partitions were built around his sculptures, and a spiraling sequence of galleries devoted to Serra was designed to offer a variety of spatial experiences.

Vast volumes bathed in natural light are the norm at Dia Beacon, but walls closely frame the eight Serras on view. Two intimately sized rooms host Scatter Piece (1967) and Elevational Wedge (2001). For the first work, Serra poured hot rubber into pliable strips that are scattered on the floor around a taut line of string suspended some eight inches off the ground. The imaginary plane that the string conjures is a reminder of the fact that there is no such thing as an action in a vacuum—that casting sculpture is always a kind of relational performance. The tension between form and action returns in Elevational Wedge, a perplexing piece for which the floor was slanted downward in relation to an inclined sheet of steel that looks like a ramp even though it remains level with the rest of the ground. Look up from there and your eye meets a window framing the top of Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001), a sculpture in which curved plates of steel, one concave and the other convex, rest on each other while calling to mind both the bow and the sail of a ship squeezed into the architecture. Close to that is Consequence (2003), a two-part wall-size drawing that plays with mass in relation to placement.

The sequence of Serra’s works culminates five steps down, in what was once the factory’s loading station. That’s where three many-ton Torqued Ellipses (1996–97) and the equally imposing 2000 (2000) quietly unfurl in a row. Dia Art Foundation commissioned the Ellipses in the mid-1990s and first showed them in an exhibition that opened in Chelsea in 1997. The twisting structures gave Serra the opportunity to work with a new sculptural form that provokes a constantly revolving, involuting experience. They continue to astonish viewers decades later—and surely will for many decades to come. Their scale is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own. Whenever I walk visitors through them, the effect is invariably one of disoriented awe.  

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi is a curator, and curatorial department co-head at Dia Art Foundation.

It was with a heavy heart that I closed my gallery last fall. Proud of all that the gallery had accomplished over the years, I noted some highlights in a closure announcement that I sent to our mailing list. I was flooded with warm responses, yet it saddened me that no art press reported on our departure. Our shows might not always have received significant reviews, but it would feel great to be recognized for the blood and sweat we poured into the business. Is it too late now to get any farewell coverage?

Oh, downtrodden former gallerist, we see you flatfooting the earth among the unwashed masses. The art world is a fickle and merciless mistress who will never thank you for the diamonds, pearls, and quarter-page Brooklyn Rail ads you have festooned on her. No, she’ll hurl these gleaming gifts in your face before striding off with another gallerist whose star-studded roster makes yours look like a gaggle of dumpster divers behind a Dick Blick. The art world we just personified could be a “he” or a “they” too, but our point is that the love you’ve expended will never be fully reciprocated. Doesn’t that stink?

Closing shop is a bitter pill to swallow, but as you pointed out, gallery closings are the trend du jour, so at least you don’t have to feel alone. Given the paltry critical attention your shows received over the years, you already knew that the freeloading freelance art press is picky, and that publishing space is rooked up. Galleries are not so different from restaurants in that they are extremely grueling to run and most of them ultimately fail. Did you watch The Bear? Did it stress you out? Imagine a similar show about an art gallery. Would you binge it? We could reassure you that this closure is just a career bump, and encourage you not to give up, but why would you want to open another gallery in the same hostile environment?

The issue here is that you are focused on the attention that you didn’t receive rather than the accolades that friends and colleagues spent real time writing. Why not hold on instead to the warm glow you get when recalling all the amazing moments that made the gallery so personally rewarding. If you still have the energy, maybe the solution is to whip up an unforgettable Hermann Nitsch-esque blood-and-entrails farewell event. It might leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, but not enough people appreciated your cooking in the first place.

I was invited to participate in a “curatorial intensive” in Eastern Europe. It’s a financial stretch for me to attend a program like this, and I have a fear that the workshop is an express boot camp for curators like me who feel stuck in curatorial assistant purgatory. Is it worth the cost, and, more important, what happens at these intensives? How do I know it’s not a waste of time?

Sounds like you’re thinking about attending art sleepaway camp. It’s scary to be far from home in a situation where you have to share a bunk with motley independent curators and Euro-strangers. If you go, you will make new international friends who have different eye-opening perspectives to share. Unless they are psychos, the other attendees will likely be as anxious as you are about this intensive experience. The enrollment fee may be high, but you can expect plenty of arts activities, group exercises, karaoke, wine drinking, and heavy meals that will become forever memories. You will make pen pals for life and might even leave with plans for more art theory–filled sleepovers in other countries. Be sure to pack your favorite books and Powerpoint slides. Don’t forget your e-flux login or Advil for this aesthetic adventure filled with art world ghost stories and moonlit dreams about shows and QR codes you will produce one day at a remote Kunsthalle. 

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

Poh confronted the lack of safe spaces in her 2021 film Kin, a 3-minute piece wherein three individuals narrate what family means to them, each choosing terms beyond the biological and favoring chosen kinship. Poh’s most recent work, What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world (2024), follows up on these discussions by providing a glimpse into queer parenthood in Singapore. Same-sex unions are not legal in the country, and under Singaporean law, a child is seen as legitimate only if born or conceived within a “valid” marriage. This poses many challenges, including purchasing an apartment as a family unit under the public housing program.

In these two videos—both of which will feature in this year’s Venice Biennale—Poh takes a hybrid documentary approach, combining ethnography with performances she directs. In addition to recorded interviews, she constructs an environment for her subjects to perform in and express their identities and ideals in front of the camera lens.

Poh is interested in the politics of visibility and the representation of marginalized bodies as a means of asserting agency. But when we spoke over a video call, she also referenced Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, and spoke about maintaining the right to illegibility. She captures vulnerabilities in those interviews, while also shrouding the subjects in a soft pink glow.

This trade-off—between representation and opacity—comes from Poh’s experience as a child actor in a Singaporean TV series of the early 2000s, titled We Are R.E.M. This experience is the subject of works such as “THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE,” a series she began in 2021 that appropriates footage from that show. In the video GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2023), recently on view in “Proof of Personhood: Identity and Authenticity in the Face of AI” at the Singapore Art Museum, Poh employs AI on found footage of her own prepubescent body to create a deepfake avatar of her past self as a response to the public gaze and scrutiny that befell her in 2002. Accompanied by a narration that references paparazzi treatment of a 16-year-old Britney Spears, Singapore’s introduction of the Protection from Harassment Act (POHA) in 2014, and Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, an animated Poh revisits her own experiences as a young girl, touched by all that she’s learned since.

In a time when our image, whether created by us or by others, often spirals outside our control, Poh reclaims the agency that is hers, and insists on both the right to conceal and the right to be recognized. “To all the little girls,” she says at the end of the performance lecture, “may we all win.”  

The cantina’s regulars had strong reactions to the way Segovia glammed up the local watering hole. Segovia sat in the bar and “got to listen to people who hated it, who loved it,” he told me during a visit to his studio in a Porfiriato-era building in Mexico City, describing this and other works as “site-specific.”

The bull fighter is one of several toxic tropes of hyper-masculinity that Segovia, who works across painting, video, and performance, deconstructs in his work. Another frequent trope is the charro, or Mexican cowboy. For a 2020 solo exhibition at Galería Karen Huber in Mexico City, a 26-foot mural, Paisaje (2022), served as the backdrop for a performance, choreographed by Diego Vega Solorza, in which dancers, hidden behind a curtain, moved their cowboy boots in unison, before ultimately devolving into a nude dog pile.

Segovia, who will feature in the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale and have a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles this fall, is best known for his paintings that translate black-and-white film stills, both from Hollywood and Mexico’s Golden Ages, into canvases he described during our visit as “poppy, kitschy, campy, bubblegum colors.” Many feature all-male gatherings; others show a man trying to woo a woman; while still others display men in moments of supposed heroism, rescuing damsels in distress. He says the colors “gave me permission to sort of fetishize the masculinity without being too serious about it.”

Segovia’s obsession with film comes from being a “frustrated filmmaker and a cinephile,”but also from his own familial connection to the industry. His great-grandfather, Fernando de Fuentes of the Revolution Trilogy (1933–36), is considered one of Mexico’s most important early filmmakers, and his grandfather, Fernando de Fuentes Reyes, was a producer who married the actress Yolanda Varela—one of the country’s biggest stars during Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. These early films were aimed at creating a new national identity based in convenient and often sanitized versions of history—“it’s that sort of artificiality about how we tell stories” that Segovia wants to dissect in his paintings.

In Venice, Segovia has adapted his 2021 solo show, at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, that featured paintings alongside his first video work. In the Biennale, that video, Aunque Me Espine la Mano, is projected onto a screen at the center of the room—painted a neon pink to transform it into a “burlesque, draggy, campy space.” In this colorful six-minute video, two charro figures, dressed in corresponding electric pink and blue embroidered suits, take center stage. You never get a clear look at their faces, and their genders are intentionally ambiguous. The figures dress each other, then slap one another’s hands and then faces, then one violently shakes the other. There’s a growing violence in the latent eroticism, buoyed by their grunting, in each exchange.  Segovia embraces the ambiguity of their gestures: “I’m not proposing new masculinities or utopias,” he said. “It’s not prescriptive. It’s not getting at any answers.”

The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some 150 feet) into the sky. In 2018 the designer offers a wan explanation: “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bullshit, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg,” he tells the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.

Then, early 2019, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel opens to the public in Hudson Yards, the crowning jewel of a complex of towering corporate offices, luxury apartments, luxury stores, and a luxury hotel developed by a luxury gym chain. Its pristine copper-colored cladding gleams in the sun. It looks alien and a little menacing, like a digital creation clicked and dragged from a computer screen into real life. It is vacuous in its celebration of vertigo-inducing capital and private ambition, and even though it closes to visitors not long thereafter, in May 2021, it has to rank as one of the defining architectural projects—one of the defining artworks—of the era.

Miraculously, this managed not to derail the 53-year-old Englishman’s career. Gargantuan, eye-catching Heatherwick schemes continue to crop up around the world. Boris Johnson has compared him to Michelangelo. Diane von Furstenberg has termed him a “genius.” For engineer Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod,” he is “a creative genius.” Billionaire Stephen Ross, the man behind Hudson Yards, is said to view him as “the ultimate genius.”

It is no crime for artists and designers to be adored by the wealthy and powerful, of course. It’s essential. (Michelangelo certainly knew this.) But Heatherwick has become the go-to artist of the ultra-rich. Why?

ONE ANSWER IS THAT Heatherwick really can make punchy spectacles—edifices that become landmarks that patrons tout with easy pride. An early success was the Rolling Bridge, conceived for a London office and retail development where it was installed in 2004. More a kinetic sculpture than a bridge, it unfolds grandly from an octagon into a now-nonfunctional 36-foot-long footbridge over a canal in Paddington Basin. (Comprising thousands of complex moving parts that stopped working in 2021, it may never be repaired.) A few years later, his UK Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, covered with 60,000 thin acrylic rods, was a shimmering Op art tour de force. And his similar starburst of a sculpture for Manchester, England, the nearly 200-foot-tall B of the Bang (2005), emanated the thrill of a vision brought improbably to life. Sadly, it was removed because parts of its 180 spikes kept falling off. Even the lobbying of Antony Gormley, another lover of bombast, could not save it.

But these are essentially razzle-dazzle, one-note pleasures, perfect examples of Ed Ruscha’s old line about the reaction that bad art elicits: “Wow! Huh?” Whereas good art draws those same words in reverse. Heatherwick’s 2007 Spun Chair, rendered in polished copper and stainless steel, could be a mascot for his methods: a sleek chair (picture a thread spool pinched at the center) that sitters can tilt at an angle and spin in a complete circle. It’s fun for a few spins.

Heatherwick’s competitor (and collaborator on a 2022 Google building in California), Bjarke Ingels, nailed it when he told the New Yorker: “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work. An element of steampunk, almost.” He comes bearing showy designs that aim to be icons for a development, a neighborhood, a city. A prime example is his 2017 plot with Mayor Johnson to build a $260 million Garden Bridge—a tree-filled pedestrian walkway—across the River Thames in London, scrapped after having sucked up $48 million in public funds.

The Heatherwick phenomenon is not a tale of gentrification. That work has usually been done by the time he gets the call. Long ago, white-cube galleries in West Chelsea and the rent-spiking High Line paved the way for Hudson Yards, which was helped along by almost $6 billion in tax breaks enacted by dubious rezoning that made Harlem, Central Park, and Hudson Yards all one low-employment district (never mind that only one of these had people living in it: the latter is a former train yard). He is, instead, an exemplary architect for a time when cities have become unbearably expensive and the wealthiest do not believe they should have to pay taxes.

HEATHERWICK, HOWEVER, positions himself as a man of the people. In his new manifesto of a book, running nearly 500 pages, he goes on the attack against the past century of design. “Some architects see themselves as artists,” he writes in Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. “The problem is, the rest of us are forced to live with this ‘art.’” He inveighs against buildings that are “boring”—too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, serious. Some 50 pages are devoted to a diatribe against Le Corbusier, “the god of boring,” whose theories “gave permission for repetitive order to utterly overpower complexity,” which Heatherwick prizes.

“Modernist architects think boring buildings are beautiful,” Heatherwick grouses. Their minimal, theoretically loaded work has lent cover for the cheap, knockoff stuff that sits alongside it. Against these elites and their “emotional austerity,” their buildings that “make us stressed, sick, lonely, and scared,” he adopts the language of the populist politician. “I am going to make a promise to you,” he writes in a lightly condescending letter to the “passerby” that closes Humanize. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to this war. But I need you … to join us. Our aim is modest: we just want buildings that are not boring!” And if boringness sounds difficult to measure, do not worry: Heatherwick Studio has made a “Boringometer” to determine how interesting a structure’s shapes and textures are, on a scale of 1 to 10.

The obvious irony is that many Heatherwick structures read like desperate, failing attempts not to be boring, via some whiz-bang trick. They illustrate Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick—a device induced by late capitalism that falls flat for appearing to work both too little and too hard. Bulbous, grenade-shaped windows monotonously line his 2021 Lantern House apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while his newly opened 1,000 Trees mall in Shanghai features, yes, 1,000 trees, each sitting on its own mushroomlike column high in the air around the stepped building. It suggests a videogame environment, as do renderings for his overwrought multifarious proposal for an island in Seoul’s Han River.

While purporting to speak on behalf of everyday people, Heatherwick is careful to do nothing that could actually offend the ultra-rich. In a revealing passage in Humanize, he praises Antoni Gaudí’s curvaceous Casa Milà in Barcelona for “wanting to fill us up with awe and break us out in smiles.” Says Heatherwick: “Even though this building was made to provide high-end apartments for wealthy people, I believe it is a gift.” We should be grateful.

Heatherwick’s pitch sounds precisely attuned to the ears of politicians who are disinclined to pursue projects that might actually benefit the public at a time of government austerity (forget about the emotional strain). Self-styled technocrat Michael Bloomberg blurbed Humanize, praising it as “a powerful prescription for buildings that put the public first.”

“Our most vulnerable people live in the most boring buildings,” Heatherwick writes on a page that is illustrated, bizarrely, by the burned-out Grenfell Tower, where 74 people died in 2017. “Why should absence of boredom be a luxury good?” Heatherwick, it should be noted, has not pursued any large-scale, or affordable, housing projects that I am aware of.

Making buildings and cities that are more hospitable, livable, and generous is a noble pursuit, but the designer of a cold and imposing nine-figure stairway to nowhere does not feel like the right man for the job—not least because he and his developer-patron declined to install safety features after a series of suicides there. (Following the fourth, they finally closed it; nets are reportedly being tested.) Standing below it, I do not feel that I am receiving a gift.

STILL, IT IS EASY to share a common enemy with Heatherwick: boring buildings that exhibit little regard for those who use them. We all spend time in places made with little imagination and even less care. We deserve more. As he writes, “we’re richer than we’ve ever been at any point in history.” Heatherwick, making that pitch to deep-pocketed developers, has not often been able to deliver satisfying structures, but his brio should inspire everyone, whether commissioned architects or apartment renters or voters, to ask for more.

In any case, some ideas that Heatherwick floats in his tome for creating better buildings are sensible mainstream ones that practitioners and activists do advocate, like reducing regulations and simplifying planning processes. (Such moves could also assist wealthy developers, to be sure.) But my favorite Heatherwick prescription is an eccentric one, and absolutely peak Heatherwick: “Sign buildings.” Instead of “staying in the shadows,” he says, a building’s creators should “be proudly named at eye level on the outsides of their projects.”

“Why would anyone involved in the process of building buildings be against this?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t you be proud? Why wouldn’t you want to sign your canvas?”