Beatrice Loayza
The party’s over: glitter, tinsel, and sparkling silver spell out contemporary doom in six new works at MoMA PS1.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Panecassio.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour, organized by Jody Graf, MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Queens,
through February 17, 2025
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What does it mean to be a painter in 2024? When buyers can’t tell the difference between pastiche and genuinely inspired abstraction? When work can be legitimized solely through the lens of identity politics, which demeaningly conflates diversification with innovation? When making a decent living off your art is contingent on the whispers of wealthy patrons looking to level-up their SoHo lofts with new statement pieces?
There’s nothing new about art as commodity. Anyone who’s exited through the gift shop or perused the home-decor aisle of a Target knows this—as did fifteenth-century Florentines, for that matter. Jasmine Gregory, an American artist living in Switzerland, has built a practice that stands against painting’s soured conventions by gutting them of meaning and rearranging the scraps. Currently at MoMA PS1 is a one-room showcase of Gregory’s recent work, marking the first museum presentation of the Zurich-based artist in the United States. Titled Who Wants to Die for Glamour—a riff on a line from John Waters’s Female Trouble—the six-piece exhibition is, in part, an assault on the history of painting and its economic structures, as well as an ironic deconstruction of generational wealth and the appraisal of luxury goods, which includes works of art.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Panecassio. Pictured: Investment Piece No. 7, 2024. Oil and glitter on linen.
Speaking most directly to these latter concerns are Gregory’s Investment Pieces, two of which (No. 7 and No. 8, both 2024) are on display. These large-scale oil paintings mimic ads for the Swiss luxury watch manufacturer Patek Philippe, cribbing the ethereal aesthetics of an airport billboard—in this case, appealing to the fantasy of a jet-setting businessman with a wife and kids back home. In velvety gray scale, we see a man embracing his pajama-clad son with one hand and stroking a newspaper with the other, his eyes closed in tender introspection. “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation,” reads text to the side of the image. Gregory’s ads are quasi-replicas of real ads from a Patek Philippe campaign, though the product itself is obscured in her renditions. Instead of a glistening silver timepiece, we see a wispy outline of the object behind a splash of sparkles. The watch is vanishing—a comment on the supposed durability attached to high-end goods, which makes them worthy of purchasing and passing down to one’s offspring. Gregory’s Investment Pieces ask what if all that’s bullshit?—calling attention to the emptiness of such marketing tools while also, through the painting’s eerie preciousness, giving the dream of financial success (specifically the kind that ensures a legacy) a dark undercurrent: if some of us are liberated by the gifts handed down by our forebears, surely others feel cursed.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Panecassio. Pictured, left to right: Find Your Dream Home!, 2024; Investment Piece No. 8, 2024; Vacant Land Available for Rent!, 2024.
For Gregory, painting carries the weight of Western art history, reflecting the transmission of not only monetary but also cultural values, such as the heteronormative family. Nevertheless, she finds a kind of freedom from this loaded lineage in the physical act of painting itself, the marks and textures that she, as a Black woman, leaves on the canvas. The original Patek Philippe ads were photographs; through painting, Gregory transforms them into defamiliarized art objects, gesturing at the relationship between herself, the artist, and the patriarchs she scrutinizes. The second Investment Piece—depicting another executive-type, steering a speedboat with his son—is sandwiched between two abstract paintings whose evocative, tongue-in-cheek titles seem to be at odds with their cryptic forms. Find Your Dream Home! (2024) is a textured black void, Vacant Land Available for Rent! (2024) a white one. Both paintings incorporate junk materials—wine, from a presumably spilled bottle, in the former and studio debris in the latter—to create a slightly rougher, splotchier texture, while alluding to the conditions under which the artist worked. Squint, and you’ll also see puzzle pieces jutting out of the canvas of Vacant Land, perhaps from the same Jackson Pollock puzzle featured in several of Gregory’s past paintings—an art commodity that here resurfaces as an almost alien excretion. The peppy titles do a lot of the conceptual heavy lifting, linking these grimly vacant, cataclysmic abstractions to homeowning aspirationalism. As such, the entire wall of paintings, with its Patek Philippe middle-piece, evokes the modern dreamer’s dead end: How to create and sustain wealth, much less breathe new life into zombified relations of power (such as those envisioned by luxury product ads) when we’re locked in the merciless clutches of capitalism?
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Panecassio. Pictured: “I have a million dollar figure . . . but it’s all loose change.”, 2024 (detail).
Gregory has described her abstract images (which in previous shows have been much more sculptural, adorned with lace and clothes hangers and googly eyes) as “literally stains . . . or inspired by stains from old palettes or rags.” Recently, she has more fully embraced ugliness and abjection, employing scrap items, some of which could be called straight-up trash, to conjure the doomed nature of existence today, a world in which a pandemic strikes and glaciers are melting but nothing changes; in which art and culture seems to be an endless retread of old forms; in which everything, even political actions, can be commodified. The New Year’s party scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread comes to mind: two lovers in an emptied-out ballroom littered with balloons and confetti and knocked-over chairs. The band continues to play, but not for long.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Panecassio. Pictured, top to bottom: “I have a million dollar figure . . . but it’s all loose change.”, 2024; One Time Shot, 2024.
Gregory’s practice, however, isn’t particularly romantic; she prefers to wear the jester’s hat—what else are we waiting for if not the punchline, anyway? In the center of the exhibition is “I have a million dollar figure … but it’s all loose change.” (2024), a plexiglass cage suspended close to the ceiling and filled with glowing LED striplights. There are also a few loose wires, a trash bag, some bubble wrap, and a champagne glass, and all together it resembles the detritus from a shitty company party, filtered through the subconscious and made to look something like a torture trap from one of the Saw movies. All this death and destruction is, if not negated, at least given a soul in the final piece, One Time Shot (2024). A white panel leans against the wall, and a sheet of plastic—more like crinkly gift-bag filling than a body bag—is draped over it, while the ribbons from a Bergdorf Goodman box, a bottle of Comme des Garçons perfume, and strands of tinsel are scattered at the panel’s base. Projected over everything is an iPhone-quality video of someone walking around a grocery store, the POV-camera swerving over discounted food products. In the middle of the panel is a vintage photograph of a Black woman and a young girl (perhaps Gregory herself with her mother), uniting the designer goods and the shoddy grocery-store footage under one marginalized family’s consumerist libido. Even the swankiest purchases, to refer back to the title of the suspended installation, can end up looking like loose change, while to die for glamour, at the very least, puts an end to all that damned yearning for something more.
Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, the Nation, and other publications.