WHO IS JORDAN WOLFSON, ANYWAY?
When it became known last year that the National Gallery of Australia had commissioned an artwork by a controversial American artist that few Australians had ever heard of and had paid AUD 6.8 million for it, public and critics alike were aghast. Journalists rushed into print to damn the work unseen and to question the NGA’s apparent profligacy.
Sebastian Smee, the Australian Pulitzer-Prize winning art critic now writing for the Washington Post, joined in from America. It’s ‘the sort of thing that will look like a total waste of money in a fairly short amount of time,’ he told the Canberra Times.
The artist is Jordan Wolfson, whose reputation as an art provocateur is well established in Europe and the United States, where his videos, animatronics, and robotic installations – with their mix of gratuitous violence, misogyny, sexism, racism and hate – have divided public opinion. Many critics see his work as little more than adolescent fantasies. Others – specifically those in the art world – see them quite differently. Nick Mitzevich, Director of the NGA who commissioned the work, told that ‘Jordan’s work pushes the envelope of
