BAD ART at PRIV.Y Gallery: Jagger van Vliet's Highlights

By JAGGER VAN VLIET, November 15, 2026

It was a downright dismal night for galleryhopping. The night was grim, cold, and wet—an all-round appropriate atmosphere for a Friday the thirteenth, in my opinion. In honor of the day, I braved the rain and trekked to the Lower East Side for a gallery show titled BAD ART.

PRIV.Y Gallery was packed when I arrived, full of die-hard aesthetes who obviously considered miserable weather no excuse to miss a gallery opening. The dress code for the evening was black turtlenecks, a nod to the city’s original bad artist, one Andrew Warhola Jr. When I entered the gallery, I found a ballot box where guests could vote for the best and worst art of the gallery. A quick look through the clear, plastic backing revealed the competition to be largely ceremonial; every vote ended up in the same pile.

My work is at the intersection of fucking dudes and getting fucked by dudes, Will Maddox, 2026 
 

Will Maddox will hate me for this, but it was his featured work that caught my eye first. It was not your usual Maddox painting, and yet the word-art collage made for a fun change of pace all the same. Maddox started with a Supreme-style underlayer reading “Fuck ass,” which he then pockmarked with disjointed internet phrases and vaguely nauseating AI jargon. Maddox explained that he had painted this piece specifically for the BAD ART show, and detested it accordingly. Meanwhile, I and about half a dozen others couldn’t stop reading what will surely become a modern aphorism: On Earth We’re Briefly Gaggy.

The next standout came from one of the gallery’s own curators. As I rounded a corner, I found Maya Ribeiro’s piece, Pissed Christ—a hanging crucifix made from two positive pregnancy tests. It wasn’t hard to make the leap from the cross to immaculate conceptions, to the natural thought: how does one procure positive pregnancy tests? Anyway, much like Maddox, Ribeiro kept talking about how awful the piece was. Hats off to PRIV.Y’s curators for choosing a theme that could make so many artists squirm looking at their own work.
 

Pissed Christ, Maya Ribeiro, 2026

After a few rounds of the gallery, I slipped outside for some fresh air. There, I ran into Ryan Bauer-Walsh, who was showing his portrait of Jerry Saltz—a piece that recently caught the attention of New York’s resident art critic. Bauer-Walsh’s arthouse fit came complete with a cape-like shawl and a hat pitched at a precariously jaunty angle. Just behind him, through the window, I could see Steve Fusco’s readymade, a Birkin bag riddled with three rounds from an AR-15.

Back inside the gallery, Goldfinch Bolton’s video performance titled I wanted so much to go back, made for a captivating end to the evening. In front of a monitor, a crowd of transfixed onlookers watched Bolton crack a dozen eggs into a bowl, only to then spend the rest of the performance carefully refilling the broken shells and replacing them in the carton. Bolton’s apathetic demeanor and white art auction gloves only served to heighten the overall absurdity.

Ballot Box in PRIV.Y Gallery
 

Weather be damned. I’d say spending an entire evening gawking at works of bad art is just about the perfect way to cap off Art Week in New York City. After all, nothing I saw could be worse than whatever is probably selling for thousands more in Chelsea. There’s bad art everywhere for those with the eyes to see. WM