In the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: "Mr. Jones's main goal seems to be to thwart the eye with formal incoherence and an overload of written information that the mind must digest before his pieces make sense.
Instead, if one wades through the long illustrated paragraph that constitutes each work's title, learning the artwork or event that each component represents, a kind of odd and often frightening poetic logic accrues.
[6] Jones began his curatorial practice in 1986, when he assembled The Public Art Show with a catalog designed by Louise Lawler and a poster by Barbara Kruger.
He went on to organize eleven exhibitions for New York City galleries (Metro Pictures, Lehmann Maupin and Josh Baer) and European and Scandinaviany institutions ("Dark Side of the Moon," Stockholm Cultural Capital of Europe Arkipelag project, 1998 and Magasin 3 Projekt Djurgårdsbrunn, 2003).
Jones wrote numerous catalogs for other artists including Elizabeth Peyton,[7] Laurie Simmons, David Salle, Terry Winters, Richard Phillips, Carroll Dunham, and Keith Edmier.
[8][9][10][11] Jones later served on a think-tank at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University which considered the future of culture in the United States in light of a diminished National Endowment of the Arts.
He served on the boards of Artists Space, the Public Art Fund, and Franklin Furnace, all in New York City, the Princeton Sculpture Symposium, and was a member of the executive committee of the Lucent Project, Brooklyn Academy of Music.
In 1999, Jones conceived of, and wrote the libretto for "Falling and Waving," the first computer generated opera produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Arts at Saint Ann's in New York City.