pocrisies in American culture have be-
come contested territory in the arts.
The Internet offers an endless variety
of images, from cats to beheadings, but
Wolfson is making his work in an in-
creasingly constrained cultural envi-
ronment. Among younger audiences,
there is a sense that art should serve
as a moral guide, upholding decency
in a world run amok. Arguments about
a given artist’s right to material have
become central to a work’s reception,
and, in some cases, to its ability to exist.
There have been protests, cancellations,
anguished editorials. Canonical West-
ern art works like Balthus’s schoolgirls
and Gauguin’s Tahitian teen-agers are
being reassessed and demoted.
With cancel culture in full swing,
Wolfson seems like an obvious candi-
date. He managed his career skillfully
in the twenty-tens, emerging with a
reputation as an exciting (if irritating)
provocateur; still, I wondered if he
could survive the shifting sensitivities
of the new era. “It’s a contemporary
version of the Gauguin question, where
we’re judgmental of the person’s be-
havior, but the person’s behavior is
what generates and is inseparable from
the subject of some great art,” the New
York collector said. The idea of the
artist as trickster and provocateur has
a long history. But, with Trump pro-
viding what one artist called “a more
interesting Jordan Wolfson in the news
cycle,” perhaps the art world is tiring
of the trope. Wolfson’s uncanny knack
for spectacle might prevent his demise,
but it could just as easily cause it.
I
n much of his work, which includes
video, animation, wall pieces, and
sculpture, Wolfson positions himself
as a kind of sexy deviant; often, he cre-
ates alter egos—mischievous, nasty
red-haired boys who dance in front of
mirrors and vivisect themselves and
pop zits and belittle women and speak
with the artist’s bedroom voice. “Peo-
ple say my work is really dark,” he told
me. “There’s nothing off-limits, no
censorship, no bad.” He went on,
“There were a lot of people, even in
the art world, who said to me, ‘You
better watch yourself. The art world
is policed.’” He paused and batted his
lashes thoughtfully, then resumed in
a kittenish tone: “When you’re having
ideas and then you’re being told they’re
bad and then you’re having an inner
censor telling you your ideas are bad,
that’s no way to live. You’re a prisoner.”
Wolfson’s most uncensored, and
most troublesome, performance may
be himself. “He turns other humans
into a prop for his dominance and forced
intimacy,” the collector told me. Stefan
Kalmár, the director of the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, in London, says
that he once went to Wolfson’s apart-
ment to conduct an interview, and the
artist met him at the door in a T-shirt,
boxer shorts, and one tube sock. “For
two days, I was his shrink,” Kalmár told
me. “I couldn’t put the bucket under
his brain as quickly as he was leaking.
Then he took a picture of me from the
Internet and created a false Grindr
profile with me as a German Nazi.”
For years, if Wolfson was not scream-
ing in someone’s face, he was whisper-
ing, hot and toxic, in their ear. He would
park in the handicapped spot, hit on
your girlfriend, assail you with argu-
ments for why your gallery should show
his work. He affronted men and
offended women. “It’s to extend his
brand of Edgelord Art,” an artist who
knows him well told me. “It’s almost
laughably banal—another rich white
person exercising their place in the
world to do better at the expense of
other people’s health. It’s by-the-book
sociopathy. Sociopaths are people who
regard people as objects.”
In 2012, Wolfson showed “Rasp-
berry Poser,” a video in which he stars
as a skinhead. Scenes of Wolfson lying
down in a park outside Paris, bare
bottom up, are intercut with sequences
depicting a C.G.I. cartoon of the AIDS
virus bopping through SoHo, into
“Sorry I’m late—I was stuck in the subway for twenty years.”
