“Your Patience Is Appreciated,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2024

Rings of color bleed eerily from a circular sheet of plasterboard – carved from the interior of Marian Goodman Gallery’s former premises on 57th Street in Manhattan. For 43 years, after each show there closed, a fresh layer of paint was added to the wall, usually white-cube white, but sometimes gray, beige, or even blue. Now, these temporal strata resurface as chromatic whorls, exposed by the spinning abrasive of a sander.

This object, Pierre Huyghe’s Timekeeper Drill Core (MGG 57th St) (2024), sets the tone for “Your Patience Is Appreciated,” the 50-artist inaugural show of the gallery’s vast new space in Tribeca, a Janus-faced look at the institution’s storied past and uncertain future. One of two such samples, its radial lines evoke the tree rings that chart historical climate change, mapping time from inside to out, core to bark, birth to death. As in these arboreal samples, Huyghe’s core has fixed dimensions, meaning that growth has stopped; something is dead. But what?

Since 1977, Marian Goodman has avowed her commitment to “a culture-critical sense of our way of life, [and] a dialectical approach toward reality.” [1] These criteria have governed her choices of which artists to represent, leading her toward those who synthesize these values less in statements than in questions – about the status of photography (Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall); the boundaries of their mediums (James Coleman, Tacita Dean, William Kentridge); and their institutional frames (Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham, Gabriel Orozco). Formulating these problems and advancing their solutions, these artists played Virgils to the Dantes of such leading critics as Michael Fried, Rosalind E. Krauss, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.

“Your Patience Is Appreciated,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2024

The resulting triangular interplay among artists, critics, and gallerist exemplifies the economic structure that Cynthia and Harrison White have labeled the dealer-critic system, the avant-gardist alchemy whereby anti-commercial art becomes commercially viable. [2] First, dealers cultivate a reputation for discovering artists whom critics deem important (e.g., Goodman exhibits Broodthaers, whom Buchloh and Krauss beatify). Next, the gallery converts that credibility into sales, seducing collectors for whom art serves as a marker less of riches than of taste (e.g., a preference for vacuum-formed plaques over skillfully wrought paintings). Every increase in a Goodman artist’s prestige amplifies the reputational bump conferred by her name, which helps position the younger artists whom she chooses to represent, which makes them more legible to critics, who make them more prestigious, and so on.

Today, however, transformations in the art market threaten to render this model obsolete. [3] Not because money has finally gotten into bed with art and criticism (it’s always been a ménage à trois) but because their relationship is taking on new forms. As dealer/artist relations become less committed and more transactional, the latter need Hollywood-style agents to negotiate their contracts. [4] Meanwhile, the polemical style of Buchloh and Fried – antithetical in criteria but united in rigor – has largely given way to affective proclamation à la Jerry Saltz. Ultimately this shift matters only to a small coterie of insiders, as criticism cedes its value-imparting function to inter-collector competition, mass-media hype, and the market itself. [5] Yes, my inbox is always filled with pitches for “coverage.” But if the reps sending those emails had to choose between a feature in Artforum and a fashion-brand partnership … critique, make way for collab.

I know how I sound – like the latest in a long line of wolf-criers. But let’s do like the economist and look to revealed preference. Three of Goodman’s best-known and highest-pricing artists (Kentridge, Wall, and Gerhard Richter) have all decamped for mega-galleries. [6] These departures indicate a view that it matters little whether a name like “Gagosian” helps us to place the work art-critically – it doesn’t – because reputational capital has ceded the stage to, well, capital tout court. [7]

“Your Patience Is Appreciated,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2024

On that note, my visit to “Your Patience Is Appreciated” came just after one of Goodman’s artists, Maurizio Cattelan, sold his duct-taped banana, Comedian (2019), for 6.2 million dollars at Sotheby’s. He meant to mock his collectors’ bestial greed and the primal frenzy of the auction-house scene. But one person wasn’t laughing: the impoverished Bangladeshi immigrant from whom the artist had bought the fruit for just 25 cents. Learning of the 25 billion percent markup, the distraught street vendor felt like the joke was on him. Cattelan might have claimed this reaction as an integral part of the work, a far more visceral indictment of art-world avarice than the banana stunt itself. But he shrunk away, saying: “Art, by its nature, does not solve problems – if it did, it would be politics.” [8]

These words were ringing in my head when I entered the gallery and saw work number one, Cattelan’s Ghosts (2021), in which three stuffed pigeons perch atop a found “I ❤️ NY” poster that anonymous mourners have inscribed with heartfelt tributes to victims of the 9/11 attacks. Was the work meant to be poignant, a sincere effort at memorialization? Or deadpan, the taxidermized birds incarnating indifference to others’ loss and, hence, casting emotional expression as hopelessly banal? In its apparent refusal to choose, the work instances nihilistic indifference to a crucial plot in Goodman-ian art history – the analytical dissection of how, under crisis conditions, commemorative efforts get repressed or co-opted (e.g., Buchloh’s Richter forcing the German public to acknowledge their complicity in the Holocaust; Krauss’s Kentridge asking how art can capture but not banalize the violence of apartheid). Neither advancing nor rebuking these critical inquiries, Cattelan simply ignores them. After all, these questions are political. And politics, we now know, has no place in art.

Compare Ghosts with Andrea Fraser’s 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018), which graphs in pie charts the political donations made by museum trustees. Fraser builds on now-canonized work like Hans Haacke’s by insinuating an institutional-critical tradition into the reigning pictorial idiom of corporate presentations: data visualization. That the charts come in red and blue likewise ironizes the utopian binary of El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). Today, red remains politically symbolic, but now in the gamified idiom of electoral maps.

Fraser’s work epitomizes the core value of Goodman’s project: a sense that critique starts at home, that any art aspiring to confront social problems must also be self-critical, challenging the enterprise of the avant-garde itself. Take Dijkstra’s photographs of women in a Liverpool club (1995). They recall August Sander’s social-typological portraiture but show physiognomy buried under layers of cosmetics, anticipating the conversion of self into image that Instagram has completed. Or Steve McQueen’s photograph Lynching Tree (2013). It adopts the generic conventions of landscape photography but imbues the verdant setting with the memory of extrajudicial murder, warning how easily ecologically minded art can efface political conflict within scenes of natural beauty. Or Tavares Strachan’s two Endless Love sculptures (2024). They invoke Renato Bertelli’s Continuous Profile (1933) but replace its abstracted portrait of Benito Mussolini with that of Nina Simone, questioning whether political art can reprise old idioms while merely swapping out content.

“Your Patience Is Appreciated,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2024

These examples indicate the gallery’s enduring belief in its 96-year-old founder’s stated ideals. Clearly, there are still artists committed to Goodman’s culture-critical vision. And, insofar as her gallery continues to exhibit them, it must believe that it doesn’t have to choose between cultural conviction and commercial viability.

If, finally, we circle back to the tree-ring-like Timekeeper Drill Core, can we now say whose death it marks? Not of the gallery’s ethos but only its old building? 57th Street is dead, long live Broadway? Such a pronouncement would misunderstand the work’s unique temporality as being in and about the present. Rather, in its merger of natural- and art-histories, the core asks us to imagine ourselves looking back at it from some post-human future, a time when Homo sapiens artifacts no longer feel so different from lithified termite tunnels. From that distant viewpoint, the conflict among galleries would seem puny – perhaps like the battle of the ants described in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), their vicious struggle meaning everything to them and nothing to us.

But we should not mistake Huyghe’s telescopic view for Cattelan-style nihilism. Huyghe is not dismissing our concerns as parochial or meaningless. How could he? The core itself exists within Goodman’s institution, not only in its real, physical space, but in the encompassing discourse that makes it intelligible as art – in conversation with Broodthaers, Fraser, and Orozco, self-reflexively analyzing its institutional conditions. Huyghe thus cannot fully take the speculative viewpoint that his work projects. It is an insider’s view of an outsider’s view.

Likewise, because I am a critic, I have obvious motives for wanting Goodman to prove the dealer-critic system viable. As the careers of critic and scholar become more and more precarious, galleries are bringing expertise in-house, commissioning serious essays for hardcover catalogues and periodicals like Gagosian Quarterly, which pay authors much more than more established outlets do. Caught in the family romance of those critics I admire, I’d rather write for Texte zur Kunst – at least for now. Yet I cannot help but wish that, in trading money for recognition, I could do more to advance the artists whom I admire, could influence collectors to support them and the dealers that represent them. And so, partial and uncertain, pessimistic but not resigned, I cannot be indifferent to whether it can chart a different path from its competitors as conditions change around it. I cannot occupy that disinterested viewpoint from the distant future imagined by Huyghe’s cores. I do not live there but here. And here, the difference matters.

“Your Patience Is Appreciated: An Inaugural Show,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, October 26–December 14, 2024.

Harmon Siegel is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of Painting with Monet (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Image credit: courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, photo Alex Yudzon