Bad at Sports Episode 923:Jerry Gagosian aka Hilde Lynn Helphenstein Part 1

At NADA Miami 2025, Bad at Sports' Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, better known to most of the art world as meme-lord and art-world agent provocateur Jerry Gogosian. In a conversation that swings between dead serious and totally unhinged, Hilde traces the unlikely origin story of Jerry: a near-fatal tick bite in Hudson, NY; weeks in the ICU where she went blind, deaf, and lost the use of her hands and feet; and the eight-month bedridden period that led her to start making art-world memes "six or seven a day" just to stay sane. 

She explains how Jerry Gagosian—a name cheekily mashed up from Jerry Saltz and Larry Gagosian—became an anonymous voice for the insiders, registrars, assistants, and "world's oldest interns" of the art world. Positioned "at the cutting edge of stating the obvious," Jerry's memes mined the absurdities of art fairs, galleries, power, and self-seriousness, often circulating so widely that even Arne Glimcher at Pace blasted one to the entire staff. For Hilde, the memes were "fast food," while the deeper writing and podcasting they spawned became the real work.

The episode also dives into Hilde's hatred of artspeak, her love of Pixar movies as real art, and the gulf between what artists claim their work does in press releases and what's actually visible in the work. She riffs on turning incomprehensible exhibition texts into literal film scripts, skewers academic pretense, and praises the raw "holy" feeling of walking into a gallery without any language or theory at all. 

In the second half of the conversation, Hilde talks about going to business school at NYU Stern after years inside galleries and the market. Learning macro- and microeconomics, statistics, and reading things like Enron's 10-K filings gave her a new lens on the art world as a distorted, unsustainable luxury market in a broader service-and-finance-based U.S. economy. From there, she and the hosts push into the hard questions: oversupply and under-demand for art, MFA pipelines, self-censorship, the moral theater of "perfect" artists, and why she believes most art schools should probably be consolidated or shut down.

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

Jerry Saltz
https://www.vulture.com/author/jerry-saltz/

Larry Gagosian
https://gagosian.com/

Arne Glimcher
https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/arne-glimcher/

Ben Davis
https://news.artnet.com/author/ben-davis

Kenny Schachter
https://www.artnet.com/artists/kenny-schachter/

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

Barbara Kingsley
https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-kingsley-5b6b2411/

Delvin Duarte
https://www.instagram.com/delvinduarte/

Keith Boadwee
https://www.keithboadwee.com/

NADA Miami
https://www.newartdealersalliance.org/

Art Basel Miami Beach