Private Views: Rest in Peace, Jerry Gogosian

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, better known as the art world memer @jerrygogosian, was found dead on May 31 in her room at the Rosewood, a five-star hotel in São Paulo. 

According to local media, Brazilian police reportedly found an empty bottle of vodka, fragments of glass and prescription pills strewn around her body. She was in São Paulo recovering from cosmetic surgery and, the day before her death, another Rosewood guest filed a complaint about her being visibly drunk and erratic. A man who identified himself as her surgeon later went to the hotel after being unable to reach her. The police have reportedly opened an investigation into her death, which was deemed “suspicious.”

Helphenstein, who was 40-years-old when she died, launched @jerrygogosian anonymously in 2018, making incisive memes about the hypocrisies of the art world and calling out art dealers, museums, artists and art advisors. At the time, there was widespread speculation about who was behind the account. Friends wondered if it was me or one of my female colleagues. Maybe it was because the tone of her voice felt so distinctly feminine, or because few others possessed the proximity to that world needed to make those observations. Helphenstein was among the pioneers of a new form of cultural criticism: one communicated through memes and appealing to people far beyond the scholarly confines of the art world.

Although I unfollowed the @jerrygogosian account many years ago and never met or connected with Helphenstein, I’ve been acutely aware of her over the years, in part because she was such a polarising figure. The news of her death prompted an outpouring of tributes from friends, admirers and followers sharing memories of her life. Yet the eulogies were partial. 

In his tribute, the artist Michael Thibault recognised that she was a “complicated girl.” Her ability to be so unfiltered is probably one reason why most people either disliked or related to her. She mirrored something in most of us, like how we’re terminally online, or how we’ve been the drunkest girl in the room, or how we’ve publicly made less than tactful statements that maybe seemed very funny and smart at the time. We all want to feel seen and get our points across but most of us will never be brave enough to try to do it so unabashedly – albeit as messily – as she did.

I remember one instance in 2024, when she was in conversation with The New York Times writer Zachary Small at the launch event for his book Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022. When I came to the Francis Kite Club in the East Village for the event, she was in a booth with her fiancé and a few others cheerily downing cocktails. But, during the conversation with the author, she veered wildly off topic, raving tipsily about other things like how she had recently been on a private jet with Beeple. Afterwards, Small asked me how I thought the talk went. I said it was great. They responded: “Really?”

The pairing for the book launch seemed very ideologically mismatched because, a few months before this, Helphenstein posted a public apology to the Sotheby’s auctioneer Ashkan Baghestani shortly after she had asked: “Who would name their kid Ashcan?” This made the internet very angry. It didn’t seem to align with the politics of a writer who had also made a career of correcting injustices in the art world. She wrote: “I have apologised directly to the person, and I have also been in dialogue with every single person who has posted today that I am a xenophobic, bitter Karen who posts hate speech.” Baghestani gracefully accepted the apology, responding that we all “live and learn,” and signed his own statement with “love and light.” We all moved on. 

The @jerrygogosian account really rose to fame in 2020, during the height of the pandemic and during the trickledown effect of the #MeToo movement. On Instagram, Helphenstein made sexual harassment allegations against Sam Orlofsky, then a senior director at Gagosian Gallery. She encouraged others to come forward and to share their own experiences with Orlofsky. Gagosian later fired Orlofsky following an investigation into complaints by current and former employees. The memes she shared after this chapter never seemed as socially minded. 

An artist friend once told me that I could “do something like Jerry Gogosian,” if only I “could somehow manage to not get too self-conscious about it.” Although the artist was critical of her, she acknowledged that Helphenstein possessed a quality that most people don’t have: she was entirely unapologetic in her message, whether it landed or not. She wasn’t someone who seemed to ever archive her Instagram posts or who had the type of anxiety that comes from thinking about what others think of you.

As her account gained popularity, a lot of the discourse around it centred on Helphenstein’s looks. She was incredibly beautiful and thin and had a face that looked expensive. Referencing Helphenstein, a publicist once told me he loved it when women “looked like plastic.” During Frieze Los Angeles one year, another writer told me Helphenstein “used to be fat,” as if to suggest that this explained much about her psyche and her framing of the art world as an inherently toxic place that would not have previously accepted someone who looked “like her”. 

More recently, @artdaddy, an account run by the art writer Anni Irish, responded to Helphenstein’s claim last year that she was done with the @jerrygogosian account. Irish went as far as to make a detailed timeline of Helphenstein’s downfall, calling out her “slow erosion of satire into full-blown personal meltdown,” arguing that her mental health struggles and separation from her fiancé had factored in. In her Substack, Irish also noted several of Helphenstein’s other failures, including how gaining representation by United Talent Agency in 2024 never materialised into anything significant.

In response to an Artnews article reporting on her departure from the @jerrygogosian account, Irish wrote: “If there’s one thing that signals your influencer arc is officially in the rearview, it’s when one of the major art publications writes your eulogy. And dear reader, I have been waiting to write this hot take for months.” Helphenstein’s mission, she wrote, was to “satirise the system, to reveal its absurdity from the outside.” Yet she became the very thing she mocked, Irish argued, adding that the more Helphenstein “tried to scale the art world’s pyramid, the more the foundation crumbled beneath her.” 

She added: “Until then, RIP to a meme queen, a chaos merchant, a human contradiction and a deeply weird, deeply human reflection of the art world she loved to drag.” Helphenstein responded by calling Irish ugly.  

The news of Helphenstein’s death first came from my editor, then flooded onto my phone as I was having a martini at Fanelli’s in SoHo with an artist who was aware of her account but never really gave it too much thought. He preferred not to get his art criticism in meme form. We talked about who to reach out to for this story. I contacted some of the more popular art meme accounts and other people I knew who had shared strong thoughts about Helphenstein over the years, despite never having met her. The main consensus was that, in retrospect, she had been unfairly demonised by the public, like many people who speak their truth.

The owner of @diallectuals told me: “Hilde was someone that built a true public forum for the art world to audit itself – but I think it’s also worth mentioning, far beyond satire, she was a creator in her own right and perhaps one of the very first major names in the art space. It’s important that we place more people like her at the centre of cultural discourse, who embrace new media and new ideas, and not push away or keep at the margins in favour of the old worn and broken path.”

The owner of @momaps5 said: “I will always remember Hilde as a firebrand that managed to cut through the bullshit and elitism of the high art world and show us the true circus. Her humour was so politically informed. Being able to connect with someone who's also an ‘outsider’ in this industry was very affirming.”

The owner of the account @divacorp_usa said: “I first knew Hilde the same way many people might know me: as an anonymous internet presence. So I have trouble understanding that she is now ‘gone.’ After I started Diva Corp, Hilde offered herself as a resource often – the big sister online that I’d never even met. She’d gone through the peaks and valleys of the internet, and I think she wanted to protect me from all of it. She was tough and generous. We disagreed and traded secrets. I always imagined we’d meet one day; maybe we still will.”

Helphenstein “gave the art world a rightly deserved and refreshing middle finger sometimes,” a former colleague told me. Another said he was in Miami last December for Art Basel in Miami Beach and it “felt like the whole fair was waiting for her next Instagram post.” Another just sent the link to her Artnews obituary with the caption: “Wild!” The latter couldn’t believe she died at the Rosewood; that’s where the press usually stays during the São Paulo Bienal, and we both recognised the opulent minibar shown in the police report, which has ice buckets fitted with amethyst crystal handles. She went out like she lived, which is “iconically,” he added. 

Rest in peace, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, and deepest condolences to her family, loved ones and everyone whose lives she touched, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively. Few figures have been as impossible to ignore. Helphenstein earnestly tried to change the way the art world talks about itself, and that alone secures her place in its history. Whatever your memories of @jerrygogosian, we can all recognise that the world, especially the art world, lost a real one.

If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed in this article, support is available. In the UK and Republic of Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted free, 24 hours a day, on 116 123, or via Samaritans.