Jerry Gogosian, an Instagram account known for its acerbic commentary on all matters related to the art market, will be wound down by its creator, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, who said on Tuesday that she had “grown out” of the project.
“I have so loved and enjoyed being Jerry, but it is time to let it go,” Helphenstein wrote.
She formed the account in 2018 and has since gone to amass 151,000 followers. In its seven-year run, Helphenstein has used the account to pithily opine on matters ranging from auction records to artist representation, mock dealer Larry Gagosian (the account’s namesake), and document her travails at art fairs across the globe.
Prior to starting the account, Helphenstein had run her own gallery in Los Angeles. “I contracted a disease that had me in bed for a year,” she told W of her decision to launch Jerry Gogosian. “I wasn’t even thinking about followers; I just thought it was inside-track jokes. Then, it went from 100 people—which is about what I thought I’d get—to 18,000 in four months.”
She initially ran the account anonymously, leading Artnet News to write in 2019 that the person who ran “this crabby little account” had “become a little anxious,” moving her to lock the Instagram and make it private. By 2020, Helphenstein had made her account public again and revealed herself as its creator.
Though many of the account’s posts were crass memes of blue-chip marketeers and collectors, some had consequences on the art world more broadly. In 2020, for example, Gagosian gallery dropped director Sam Orlofsky after Helphenstein urged people to come forward with sexual harassment allegations against him.
Helphenstein became famous through the account and went on to curate a Sotheby’s sale in 2022. But occasionally, its posts also landed her in hot water. Last year, Helphenstein mocked the name of a Sotheby’s auctioneer, leading him to accuse her of xenophobia. She later apologized, admitting the joke was made “in poor taste.”
It wasn’t immediately clear why Helphenstein was shuttering the account. She signed with the talent agency UTA in 2024. Also last year, she told the Wick that she was working on “too many projects and it has uncentered me,” but she did not detail what those projects were.
“As for me, I have a wide open road and I’m working toward manifesting the next thing I will go onto to do,” she wrote on Instagram. “It may be in art. It may not be.”
