The news reached New York the next day, prompting an outpouring of messages from the people who consumed her content, and those on the receiving end of the barbs. Even Jerry Saltz, her namesake, chimed in.
“I found myself very sad at her death; her writing always had a real suspiciousness, knowingness, and even cynicism to it. But the art world beat a path to her byline,” Saltz wrote on Instagram. “I was very touched by and able to chuckle with knowing at her choice of my first name as hers. She tattled and rattled cages at a moment when this really needed it.”
The outpouring of admiration after Helphenstein’s death reveals the story of a complicated person in an industry that’s fiercely territorial about who it lets in. She was an art world social media fixture but was only sporadically able to monetize it. In the last two years, she was navigating an ever-changing online landscape amid an art market in the middle of a downturn.
“All I can say is that when she was good, she was truly great,” Annie Taylor, a collector who cohosted the Art Smack podcast with Helphenstein, told me. “There are few people who could operate the way she did: with poise, cutting intelligence, and a whip-smart sense of humor. She saw through people and sometimes allowed people to see through her as well.”
Eric Shiner, the president of Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, had seen her just a few months earlier.
“Hilde and I got together for drinks in Palm Beach in February at the Breakers Hotel,” he told me. “She was happy and filled with new ideas on her next chapter of life. She was pondering writing a book, working on a screenplay, and focusing on her art again, making beautiful watercolors of Florida’s lush flora. She gave me one that day, and I’ll treasure it forever, just as I’ll treasure her wit, her bravery, and her friendship.”
Shiner, who spent years as the director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, compared her to that great artist who chronicled fame through new media.
“Just as Andy Warhol held up a mirror to society, analyzing, critiquing, and reformulating the American experience, so, too, did Hilde become a foil of the art world, forcing us to look at it not as a market or a career choice, but as a community made up of incredibly complex players, each with their own agenda,” he said. “Like Warhol, Hilde had a singular objective: pull back the curtain on all of it. Expose it, laugh at it, be reviled by it. In so doing—and each in their own way—both artists did more to democratize the art world than most.”
Helphenstein launched Jerry Gogosian in 2018 while dealing with an illness that sidelined her from the on-your-feet nature of dealing art. It was an immediate sensation among art world insiders. Helphenstein successfully applied mass-culture meme formats to the whole gamut of the art-selling experience. It was darkly funny satire, some posts directed at the insider-y struggles facing those who do grunt work at galleries and auction houses, some posts directed at the high-flying lifestyle of collectors and the dealers and advisers who serve them. She clearly loved artists, famous and not—but the artists were not spared from the barbs. For years she deployed memes as her métier, spawning a host of imitators but few peers. And she managed to remain anonymous, intriguing insiders who chuckled at the memes and bringing in a larger audience to marvel at the art world’s eccentricities and whims.