Jordan Wolfson's first New York gallery show in a decade opened at Gagosian last Friday, exactly a week after the 25th anniversary of 9/11, with three new sculptures tied to that day. One presents an architectural model of the World Trade Center in black and white. Another shows the Twin Towers at dusk, pixelated as if pulled from the internet's depths. A third depicts the Freedom Tower, its metallic surface gleaming with sunlight.

The review of the untitled exhibition, published by ARTnews, delivers a blunt verdict: the only shocking thing about Wolfson's Gagosian show is how boring it is. The critic writes that these works are "classic Wolfson" in that they aim to provoke pearl-clutching or self-righteous handwringing, yet from this reviewer they get "one big shrug."

That verdict stands in sharp contrast to the artist's track record. Wolfson's previous pieces include a cyborg monster gyrating before a mirror, a chained-up child doll that repeatedly slammed itself to the ground, and a VR horror work at a Whitney Biennial in which viewers watched the artist bash in a man's head with a baseball bat. Last year he used VR again at Fondation Beyeler, allowing viewers to body swap without advance warning.

Wolfson has spent roughly a decade building a career on provocation, earning two Whitney Biennial placements, a loyal collector base, and a collaboration with Prada. Since 2022 he has been represented by both Gagosian and David Zwirner — what Nate Freeman, in a recent Vanity Fair profile, called an "art-world EGOT-level feat." The artist himself described the Gagosian exhibition, in an interview with Artnet News, as a "very traditional sculpture show."

It pretty much is. The exhibition consists entirely of aluminum sculptures, most propped against the wall of one windowless room. All have spikes at their corners; nearly all are polished to a reflective sheen. All but two are inset with large photographic prints.

A gallery sign warns of "mature content" and "sharp edges," and instructs adults to monitor their children — reasonable, given that Instagram has deleted posts featuring some of the works. A guard stopped the reviewer with another warning not to touch the spikes.

The sculptures look back to Minimalism, echoing the industrial menace of Richard Serra's 2001 Elevational Wedge in two photo-less ramp-like works placed at the gallery's center. The wall pieces insert images from across art history. One riffs on Jeff Koons's "Made in Heaven" series (1989–91), taking a painting of a nude Koons cupping the thighs of Cicciolina and running it through an AI generator, remaking Koons with the moony eyes and flushed cheeks of the so-called "Pixar DILF." The critic calls it "a lame one-liner of an artwork," noting Wolfson chose one of the tamest paintings in the series.

Wolfson also takes on Robert Mapplethorpe — but appropriates a 1984 photograph of two tulips in a black void rather than the S&M imagery that fueled a culture war. In an unusually deferential gesture, Gagosian's checklist states the photo was used with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation's permission. A third piece gives Philip Guston's 1969 painting The Studio, featuring a Klansman at an easel, the AI treatment. The critic notes it might have caused anger in 2020, when the National Gallery of Art delayed a Guston retrospective, but in 2026 it arrives "about six years too late to offend anyone."

Wolfson won't say what the work is about. The reviewer's own read: the through-line between Koons, Mapplethorpe, and Guston — alongside Wolfson's other subjects, from Bob Dylan (given AI-generated pecs) to Victorian-era pornography, Shrek the Musical, and Renoir — is that all have been branded déclassé, fairly or not.

Despite the pointy protrusions and flirtations with taboo, the critic concludes, the sculptures are not spiky enough to leave a mark, and not even the 9/11 works are vulgar enough to land the artist in hot water. "Exhibiting a pile of hot, steaming garbage might have been more transgressive," the review notes — a verdict that raises the question of where a provocateur goes once provocation stops working.