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Bad at Sports Episode 924: Hilde Lynn Helphenstein is Jerry G part 2

Release Date: 12/12/2025

Bad at Sports

Recorded live at NADA Art Fair, this episode finds the crew in full fair-mode: cramped booths, warm beverages, and the particular energy of artists, curators, and dealers trying to make something real happen in public. Joining the conversation is Amy Kligman, founder of Special Effects Gallery, a Kansas City–based gallery barely out of the gate and already showing at fairs. Alongside Tom Sanford, the conversation moves quickly from logistics and booth banter into something deeper: how artists carry histories, how objects hold people, and how a gallery can function less like a marketplace and...

Bad at Sports Episode 943: Nanako Kono and Olivia Zubko

Bad at Sports

From the humid chaos of Miami Art Week, Bad at Sports drops into the garden at NADA for a conversation with two artists from Western Exhibitions: Nanako Kono and Olivia Zubkov. A loose, funny, and surprisingly thoughtful discussion about painting that isn’t painting, sculpture that remembers your body, and bathrooms as sites of intimacy, memory, and quiet surveillance. Nanako walks through her hyper-flat, acrylic-based “paintings” that live somewhere between screen, object, and comic logic. Olivia counters with slip-cast porcelain sculptures drawn from domestic life. Towels, tiles, soap...

Bad at Sports Episode 942: Embajada Gallery

Bad at Sports

Recorded live at NADA Art Fair, Episode 942 features a deeply generous conversation with gallerist and artist Christopher Rivera—founder of Embajada (“Embassy”) Gallery in Puerto Rico. Joined by hosts Ryan Peter Miller, Tom Sanford, and William “Bill” Pereda, Rivera discusses artist-led infrastructures, building a gallery as a political and conceptual project, and the evolving ecosystem of Puerto Rican contemporary art. At the center of the conversation is Rivera’s presentation of artist Taina Cruz whose hybrid practice—spanning painting, robotics, and installation—anchors the...

Bad at Sports Episode 941: Myra Greene

Bad at Sports

Recorded live in Atlanta at the Art Papers Symposium at Ponce City Market, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist, educator, and department chair Myra Greene for a conversation on materiality, identity, and the long arc from photography to textiles to weaving. The conversation centers on practice as evolution, about what happens when an artist refuses to stay in one lane, and about how material decisions carry conceptual weight. Greene reflects on her move from Columbia College Chicago to Spelman College, where she helped build a program grounded in storytelling,...

Bad at Sports Episode 940: Emily Llamazales

Bad at Sports

Recorded live during the Art Papers Symposium in Atlanta, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist Emily Llamazales to talk speculative biology, adaptive futures, and sculptural ecosystems that feel equal parts laboratory experiment and sci-fi relic. Emily’s work merges biochemistry, ecology, and material experimentation into immersive sculptural forms that hover between organism and artifact. From translucent photo-printed fabrics to ceramic “creatures” built from invasive species logic, her practice imagines a world where mutation is survival and adaptation is aesthetic...

Bad at Sports Episode 939: Sarah Higgins

Bad at Sports

Art Papers, Fire Ecology, and Ending Well This week on Bad at Sports, we sit down in Atlanta with Sarah Higgins, Executive and Artistic Director of Art Papers, during the Art Papers symposium. What unfolds is a candid, generous, and surprisingly hopeful conversation about what it means to end something well. As Art Papers approaches its final chapter after nearly 50 years, Higgins lays out a model for institutional closure that resists panic, rejects compromise, and instead asks: what if ending is a form of contribution? From the “fire ecology” framework to radical transparency about...

Bad at Sports Episode 938: Tori Tinsley

Bad at Sports

Recorded live at the Art Papers Symposium in Atlanta, this episode features a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation with Tori Tinsley. Joined by Brian Andrews and Duncan MacKenzie, Tinsley reflects on caregiving, grief, motherhood, and the evolution of her “hug” figures across painting, sculpture, and animation. Her practice emerges from lived experience, particularly her mother’s diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia, and expands into a broader inquiry into emotional labor, embodiment, and the absurdity of contemporary life. Humor, instability, and tenderness coexist in work...

Bad at Sports Episode 937: Nato Thompson

Bad at Sports

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Abigail Satinsky sit down with Nato Thompson for a conversation that spans collapsing institutions, alternative economies, and what it actually means to sustain a life in art. Recorded in the context of an art fair ecosystem that increasingly blurs community, commerce, and survival, Thompson reflects on his path from Creative Time to Philadelphia Contemporary (RIP unrealized museum), and into his current multi-pronged practice: consulting, artist support, and the evolving Alternative Art School. What starts as a casual catch-up...

Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks

Bad at Sports

Locks’ exhibition operates as a split composition: the back gallery leans into layered, exploratory collage rooted in his teaching experience with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Correctional Center, while the front gallery delivers sharper, declarative works built around text and figuration. The conversation frames this as a kind of A-side / B-side logic, with one space functioning like improvisational jazz and the other like a stripped-down, urgent punk track. Locks pushes back on easy analogies, but embraces the underlying idea: that both bodies of work are...

Bad at Sports Episode 935: Chicago Critics Roundtable

Bad at Sports

Guests: Annette LePique, Curtis Anthony Bozif, Pia Singh, Gareth Kaye Recorded with the support of Columbia College Chicago - Colum.edu What happens when you gather a room full of critics in a moment when criticism itself feels both endangered and newly alive? In this long-awaited return to the Chicago Critics Roundtable, Duncan sits down with a new multi-hyphenate crew of writers, curators, artists, and exhibition-makers to unpack the shifting role of criticism in a fractured “art ecology.” What emerges is a conversation about care, attention, subjectivity, labor, and the strange intimacy...

More Episodes

In Part 2 of the Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (Jerry Gogosian) conversation, the discussion turns raw, vulnerable, and deeply structural. Hilde speaks candidly about burnout, public vilification, online pile-ons, and the emotional cost of living as a persona inside an unforgiving attention economy. She describes losing followers overnight, being labeled with extreme political accusations, and watching the art world take visible pleasure in her public failures while remaining silent during her successes.

She recounts the personal toll of constant media exposure, professional pressure, and economic precarity: marriage collapse, total exhaustion, and a year-long withdrawal from work following multiple suicide attempts. Jerry, she explains, has evolved from a meme engine into a living, walking performance — where even the most banal moments of daily life become content whether she wants them to or not. The episode confronts what it means to live as a meme in a broken matrix of attention, validation, and misrecognition.

The conversation pivots into economics and geography. Drawing on her business school training, Hilde walks through quantitative tightening, interest rates, the collapse of NFTs and crypto, and the bursting of the 2022 speculative bubble. She frames art explicitly as a Veblen good — a luxury asset that fails first when the economy tightens. She argues forcefully that New York is no longer an artist city, but a financialized transaction hub. Instead, she advocates for artists to relocate to affordable cities like Chicago or even small towns, building localized collector bases rather than chasing validation from elite centers.

What emerges is a sharp, pragmatic model of survival: cultivate 12 lifelong collectors, embrace regional ecosystems, make work for people you actually live with, and stop imagining museum permanence as the only measure of success. Hilde rejects the mythology of infinite institutional validation, arguing instead for circulation, use, disposal, and lived attachment. The episode closes on the tension between speculation and sustainability, between global markets and local communities, and between career branding and genuine artistic life.

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian
https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/

New Art Dealers Alliance
https://www.newartdealers.org/

John Waters
https://www.johnwaters.com/

Peaches (musician/performer)
https://peachesmusic.net/

Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)
https://www.beeple-crap.com/

Maurizio Cattelan
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/maurizio-cattelan

Brice Marden
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/brice-marden-1577

Magnus Resch
https://www.magnusresch.com/

Pace Gallery
https://www.pacegallery.com/

Roxy Theatre, San Francisco (The Roxie)
https://roxie.com/

Soho House
https://www.sohohouse.com/

Ice Palace Studios, Miami (Art Fair Venue)
https://www.icepalacestudios.com/