At my first stop during a recent Tribeca gallery stroll, I was nearly knocked out by workmen hoisting a humungous heavy steel beam down the stairs of Andrew Kreps Gallery’s location in the piss-soaked Cortlandt Alley. Barely missing a good, hard conk to the noggin was nowhere near as frightening as being trapped, alone, in the gallery’s lower floor, forced to stare at two achingly dull photographs by Roe Ethridge. One was a still life featuring a bowl of tomatoes, a vase of slightly wilty sunflowers, a few rough rotting pumpkins, and an animal skull for a dash of edgy memento mori; the other, a glowing blue orb tossed in a bed of flowers. While not bad per se, these two photographs were worse: they were boring. How much time can you devote to a light-up dog toy thrown in some greenery? Not much at all. I panicked. Should I race up the stairs, ducking past the metal danger, to flee this photographic purgatory? A bonking brain injury seemed preferable to agonizing aesthetic anguish, especially since I took the stairs hoping that the gallery put something in a project space unrelated to Ethridge’s grinning models and fashiony vacuity in the main gallery.

Once the 12-foot-plus beam made its way over the stairwell and into a back room, I scurried up, past a tired-looking gallery assistant who could have warned me before I descended. That sweet taste of freedom was short-lived, as that same antsy sense of boredom followed me through the galleries in Tribeca. And the Lower East Side. And Chelsea. And Chinatown. Which begs the question: Why does so much art, at least in galleries, seem so boring lately? Uninteresting? Uninspired? Lacking passion, hunger, or drive? Devoid of humor, joy, rage, or any emotion whatsoever? What is with that?!

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Gazing Ball Position 02 (_DSF2658), 2024, Archival pigment print (Photo by me)

When I yearn for art as egregiously hideous as Jeff Koons’s “Art Pop” snowman and Hercules sculptures embedded with shiny blue (gazing) balls like the most expensive tacky lawn ornaments money can buy, you know it’s bad. I wistfully reflected on these gaudy giants while looking at the aggressive tediousness of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs of his studio, lined with his own photographs, as viewed through a gazing ball plunked on a tripod. How revolutionary! At least the Koons had a kitschy sense of humor. In contrast, Sepuya’s TRANCE at Bortolami may offer the worst doldrums of the moment: a self-referential photography-on-photography exhibition, which mostly trades the artist’s former grubby mirrors for gazing balls. Though the press release boasts, “Sepuya weaves together new and ongoing lines of inquiry [note: what are lines of inquiry?] to create a stark constellation of image and form [another note: huh?] that reverberates with a hypnotic tension,” the show is less hypnotic as it is alienating while also coming off as a simplistic undergrad photo experiment. Oh, look a behind-the-scenes take on the studio and the very gallery we’re standing in! How riveting! TRANCE is made even more exhausting through the overblown play with materials. The first things viewers see when peering down Bortolami’s long hallway entrance are the sandbag supports holding up Sepuya’s pithily titled Studio Mirror Diptych (_DSF3596, _DSF3598), two big pics on wheeled wooden frames like a stage set, a structure designed to impress nobody but MoMA photography curators. Not even a hot and spitty mutual masturbation sesh in a gazing ball could liven up TRANCE as these pics, shoved in a smaller alcove, came off as yet another take on Robert Mapplethorpe. Can a gay artist do black-and-white photographs of a dick without becoming either a critique or an ode to Mapplethorpe? I’m not sure. Either way, in 2025, it’s not exactly refreshing.

Though Bortolami was the only gallery I left physically agitated from boredom, it was far from the only Tribeca snoozefest. At Grimm, Alex van Warmerdam’s now-closed exhibition presented hazy, distorted, and, well, grim paintings of sour-faced ladies and businessmen, creepy children, and thousand-yard staring women that were more fun in theory than in practice, rendered in blue and grey tones reminiscent of both asphyxiation and clinical depression, for which I may need treatment after gallery-hopping. Following the cloud of incense to Katie Paterson’s There is another sky at James Cohan, the flawless circles, sea glass-resembling tube, hourglass, and roasted twig on a mounted platform are at least livened up by their listed materials like “glass made from deserts across the earth” or “kiln dried wood branches gilded with the ashes of 10,000 trees.” These materials are almost poetic; the same cannot be said for the wretched text-based work marring the walls, which proclaim eye-rolly, try-hard ChatGPT one-liners like: “A live feed from a wandering planet” or “The timeline of the universe set on shuffle play.” Ugh. Both Jane Lombard Gallery’s project room basement and Sargent’s Daughters devote their space to wall-hung textiles by, respectively, Sam Dienst and Sarah Rosalena. While I can’t deny either artist’s technical prowess or craftsmanship, I struggled to see Dienst’s brightly colored noodly and doodly everyday objects and Rosalena’s tight red-and-black patterns as more than a collection of pretty and pleasant placemats tacked to the walls. Sargent’s Daughters also squeezes Gogo Graham’s ratty prize ribbons, dejected carrousel horse, and paintings of butch American Gladiators in their itty back room. I might have loved Graham’s work given more breathing space, but crammed in with several other viewers, I felt like I walked into a storage closet in a junk shop (this is kind of a compliment). It gave me claustrophobia so I didn’t stay too long in Graham’s closet, nor did I linger to look at the minimalism on a stick or canvases slathered with crap scrounged from the studio floor in the duo Denzil Hurley and Reginald Sylvester II show at Canada. Keeping with painting, I was struck by the doomed imagery of a pigeon flapping around a water tank in Cheyenne Julien’s Bronx-centered 41 Floors at Chapter NY. However, too many paintings were rendered in that same jewel tone that seemingly every figurative painter has taken up in the last couple of years, an art trend that feels at breaking point.

Yeesh (photo by me)

Not that it’s any better in less hyped gallery neighborhoods. In Chelsea, Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s scrolling, warbling, and reciting Chernobyl chic videos make even the post-nuclear holocaust seem humdrum, but hey, at least Kurimanzutto is saving electricity by not turning on any of the lights. Mark Leckey’s holy Spiderman gilded icons and animated videos at Gladstone fascinated everyone else but me—I left soon after I entered. Though I like when Karen Kilimnik uses kitty stickers like a scrapbooker in the middle of a nervous breakdown, most of her Gladstone show consists of frothy beachy paintings like retiree art on sale on a Tampa boardwalk flea market (and not even the best booth). Somehow Lehmann Maupin found yet another artist snapping even more Roman Catholic church photographs after their tired Catherine Opie exhibition. Todd Gray’s slammed-together photo frames of semi-disparate subjects are better than that but not by much, saved only by the dumb but at least amusing conflation of Iggy Pop and a Greco-Roman statue. Louise Nevelson’s sculptures are always good, I guess, but Pace’s upstairs Richard Misrach’s photographs of working industrial ships chugging around the San Francisco Bay make me want to pitch myself off the Golden Gate Bridge out of sheer disinterest. While I was tickled by a portrait of a Pez dispenser in Ulala Imai’s CALM at Karma, the mega Build-a-Bear-visits-a-landscape canvases would have been better shrunk into a Hallmark card. Some exhibits’ problems lay in their sheer repetitive monotony: Simphiwe Mbunyuza’s giant horn-sprouting ceramics covered in cows and houses are compellingly bizarre until having to wander through an entire gallery of them; the same goes for Giorgio Morandi’s drab brown-toned vases at David Zwirner. Others are so fatiguing like the tricycle and broken sink in the back of Lucia Nogueira at Luhring Augustine that I can’t muster the energy to come up with anything to say. And don’t even get me started on the bright, blobby figures stomping through Nicola Tyson’s astonishingly, almost admirably wretched paintings at Petzel. The press release describes, “Tyson’s negotiation of both gestural expression and formal virtuosity elucidates singular representations of queer subjectivity.” Sure. Whatever. And does the world need another Carl Andre solo?

Installation view of Lucia Nogueira at Luhring Augustine (photo by me)

The copious winter group shows, many of which are located in the Lower East Side and Chinatown, overall feature better inclusions that don’t throw me into a numbing fit of anhedonia, but the quickly cooked-up and tossed-off themes are so curatorially uninspired that they don’t deserve credit either. When James Cohan’s Behind the Bedroom Door, focusing on intimate spaces, is the best curatorial vision of the lot, a theme so basic it’s barely worth having, things are pretty dire out there. At least there is an idea at the heart of it. In contrast, what in the world is Lyles and King going for with Tomorrow Is Already Behind Us? The press release explains:

“Tomorrow Is Already Behind Us brings together artists whose practices push their respective boundaries of painting, sculpture, and new media. They reach into the crevices between memory, history, and time to explore these themes through symbolic imagery and motifs that bridge the past, present, and future. Motifs and symbols arise, defining the conditions of the present whether personal or universal. Knowledge culled from an unknowable past is compounded in the here and now.”

What. Why not call it These Are Some Artists on Our Roster and a Few Who We’re Considering Signing On, but We Want to See How They Sell First? 

I could go on…but I know when I’m getting exhausting.

Of course, this is just my grouchy opinion. I haven’t seen everything in NYC and even with all this moaning and groaning, there are shows worth seeing. Although you would be forgiven for finally easing into that toxic nostalgic groove of believing artists had a lot more fun in the late 20^th century than you are now, a bitch beloved by NYC boomers and the unimaginative in younger generations that I especially resent. Yet, even I have to admit some of the best exhibits on right now are of old work from the 1970s to 1990s, including Barkley L. Hendricks’s Afrofuturist cosmic high heels and black light glory holes…I mean, eclipses, Kenny Scharf’s joyous jaunts to Planet Claire, Tabboo!’s deee-lightful and groovy swirls of Pyramid Club and Wigstock promos (and my favorite, itty kitty Halloween drawing), Larry Clark’s surly skater boys, Andy Warhol’s butt polaroids, and Colette Lumiere’s golden potatoes and their corresponding funky New Wave song (“Did you eat?”). While captivating new work is few and far between, it can be found like Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg’s fucked-up Claymation fairytales like the pancake moon with a little round ass, the flighty camp duo of Samantha Nye’s ladies who lunch eating box on a picnic and Todd Strong’s zipping fairies, Brandon Morris’s spookily ethereal green fiberglass ghosty gowns, and Mathilde Denize’s Sonia-Delaunay-goes-to-outer-space couture and glittery abstractions spotted with bits of bodies. However, the fantasy of extraterrestrial hotties slinking around in Denize’s dresses dissipates instantly after taking the stairs up one floor in Perrotin to endure the gloppy, muddy monstrosities by Dora Jeridi. Yuck.

Barkley L. Hendricks, No Moon at all for Phineas, 1981-84, Graphite, colored inks and photo transfer on paper (photo by me)

I know what you’re thinking: Emily, stop grumping. It’s just the winter slump. However, this slump has endured for longer than that. Look back at Laura Swanson and my wanderings through Chelsea and Tribeca where we found only one or two exhibitions worth praising. I’m also not the only one who has noticed. Dean Kissick in his much-debated, much-shared “The Painted Protest” in Harper’s blames art’s lifelessness on identity politics and the incessant need for every work of art to broadcast a faux “radical” politic to be considered “good.” If you can get over his laughable romanticized insistence that the art world of the 2010s was a halcyon heyday with Hans Ulrich Obrist as its sleepless cult leader, Kissick rightly diagnoses a formulaic problem visible in the biennial(e)/triennial/international industrial complex in which curators tick off demographic boxes to make a proper neoliberal survey. A little Indigenous art here, a sprinkle of conceptual art that somehow, according to the label, has something to do with gender there…Kissick writes:

“There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting. Once, we had painters of modern life; now we have painters of contemporary identities. And it is the fact of those identities—not the way they are expressed—that is understood to give value to our art.”

He’s not wrong—for 2022 or 2023. When I read Kissick’s essay, my immediate response was that at the tale end of 2024, it came too late. Though you could still spot its death rattle at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, this type of identity politics-driven curating is, I suspect, nearly extinct. Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders and federal money cut-offs will threaten museum funding and wealthy donors no longer have to art-wash their ill-gotten gains in the social justice laundry to have cocktails in polite society during Trump 2.0. And you know what? I’m going to miss these shows. At least preachy art stands for something.

Nicola Tyson, The Group, 2024, Acrylic on canvas (photo by me)

Setting aside the easy identity scapegoat then, what is the problem? Is it the oft-reported art market’s decline as wealthy collectors decide they’d rather gamble on Trump, Melania, and Hawk Tuah shitcoins than buy, auction-flip, and screw over emerging artists? Is it the void left by significant gallery closures in the last few years like Queer Thoughts and Fortnight Institute? Is the demoralizing dementia-eyed 2024 election and Donnie’s Art of the Comeback that has the commercial art world in a funk?

I don’t have a definitive answer, but what keeps nagging at me is that not all creative fields suffer from this same malaise. Music, in particular, feels vibrant in a way visual art does not. In New York, the music scene is experiencing a rock revival it hasn’t seen since the post-9/11 years with a glut of passionate young bands, many women-fronted, who draw on the city’s punk and post-punk legacies. Bands like SKORTS, cumgirl8, Femcel, Puzzled Panther, and Voyeur have a tireless energy and throwback DIY approach, playing anytime, anywhere, from smaller clubs to Tompkins Square Park. On the blue-chip music level, if you want to take a term from the art world, FKA Twigs and The Weeknd just released a pair of pop albums perfect for crying in a discotheque and then drowning in the tub. And even more damning, some musicians like Ethel Cain are producing experimental art pieces that are more challenging and inventive than most visual art at the moment. Is it that creative people are turning towards other genres rather than visual art as the latter has limited pathways for anyone not independently wealthy or who didn’t go to the right chi-chi school for their MFA?

I fear that might be at least part of the issue and one that won’t be rectified easily. To be a visual artist whose work makes it into a gallery requires money—for studio rent, materials, framing, storage, an expensive degree, and loads of student debt—and time—for creating a *gag* brand, hobnobbing with curators and gallerists, enduring studio visits, and having the mental space to make the actual art. A gallery also needs money—to afford its ever-skyrocketing rent, not to mention employee salaries. This requires attempting to cater to the whims of the wealthy, a losing game that makes risk-taking nearly impossible. Add to this the schmanzier galleries’ drive to display “museum-worthy shows,” which has created a circuitous and conservative gallery-to-museum-to-gallery-to-museum pipeline, semi-based on collector tax write-offs, ensuring you only see the same damn artists and the same damn work over and over again. As it stands, the current commercial art ecosystem just doesn’t seem set up for boundary-pushing innovation without being willing to gamble on an artist or an off-kilter group show idea and potentially lose it all. The decision to avoid that is as understandable as it is, disappointingly, deeply fucking boring.