David Velasco

22.12.2025Essay

There are lines as I arrive at the Neue Nationalgalerie – long ones, snaking across the vast concrete plaza from which the museum, a squat glass pavilion, protrudes. On the façade, in bright neon scrawl, is the title of Nan Goldin’s show: This Will Not End Well. I landed in Berlin a few hours ago. It’s late on a Friday, November 2024. I meet up with Nikki Columbus, a friend from New York who is writing a piece about the night for The Nation, and we scout the perimeter, looking for familiar faces. We try our luck at the entrance. The museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, is outside. He shouts my name and grabs my shoulder, then waves us in.

Six large temporary pavilions swathed in black curtains are scattered in the sparse atrium. Each pavilion houses one of Nan’s penetrating videos or slideshows: early masterpieces like The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Other Side, plus more recent works like Sirens, an elegy to addiction. The show’s proposition is that Nan, one of our greatest living artists in any medium, merits recognition, specifically, as a filmmaker. The slideshows are not films in a traditional sense; mostly they are magnetic pictures of magnetic people drawn from the artist’s life, alchemists who have wrung beauty from desolation. The images are composed and ordered according to her singular sensibility, alert to pacing – dactyls of resemblance, resemblance, difference – and fastened together with music you might put on a mixtape to a lover: Marianne Faithfull, John Kelly, Rosalind Hunt. I think about how art is more or less a talent for putting one right wrong thing next to another to make something new, and how Nan knows this better than anyone.

I stake a spot in front of a stage near the museum’s entrance. I know what’s about to happen. Everyone does. It’s why we came. Klaus arrives and nervously asks where Nan is. A crowd collects in front of the platform – mostly young bodies in black clothes. She finally shows up, 20 minutes to eight, garnet curls, black tuxedo, trailed by a minder. The air crackles. Klaus stumbles as he walks to the lectern.

“Good evening. Good evening. My name is Klaus Biesenbach, and I’m the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and I’m really honoured that you’re all here tonight. I wish… I had a camera, I’d photograph you, it’s very beautiful. Thank you, thank you.”

The crowd is unmoved.

He continues: “As you might have heard, [Nan and I] decided to disagree. We decided to agree to disagree – you see, that was a Freudian… Um, I treasure the freedom of expression here and now in Berlin in 2024, to allow the Nationalgalerie to be such a place that you can do that. That sounds great, but I mean it.”

Nan ascends to the podium. I feel the holy tingle through my arms.

“I’m starting with a period of silence, in honour of the dead,” she begins. “Please put your phones away and join me.”

My mind runs a familiar montage – horror, depression, boredom, anger, helplessness. Here we are, for what it’s worth, feeling these things together.

“Why did I feel I have to talk tonight?” Nan asks. “This is my lifetime retrospective, but there is nothing in it from the past year, and that’s missing. The museum has kept its promise to allow me to talk, and I thank them. But they claim that my activism and my art are separate, even though that has never been the case. The last year has been Palestine and Lebanon for me. Since October 7th, I have found it hard to breathe. I feel the catastrophe in my body, but it’s not in this show.”

Germany has been consumed by a moral panic over antisemitism, and expressions of solidarity with Palestine have been demonised by the custodians of the state’s “memory culture”. Nan speaks of the more than 180 cancellations of pro-Palestine artists and teachers in Germany, the need for diverse strategies of resistance and cooperation inside the movement. She speaks of Islamophobia and the weaponisation of antisemitism, the consensus over the term “genocide” among members of the UN, even the pope. She speaks of the horror of watching the land grabs and domicide, the murders live-streamed to our phones.

“Antizionism has nothing to do with antisemitism.” Nan permits a smile as the crowd erupts in applause. “What I see in Gaza reminds me of the pogroms that my grandparents escaped. Never again means never again for everyone.” A bigger smile as the crowd cheers, and she pats her chest. A large black banner reading “ARMS EMBARGO NOW” unfurls behind her.

“The more of us there are, the more of us there are.”

Nan passes Klaus as they trade places on the platform. Neither acknowledges the other.

“As I mentioned in my introduction earlier,” Klaus begins, but his words are overwhelmed by the crowd’s chants of “Free, Free Palestine!” “As I mentioned in my introduction earlier,” he tries again, “I disagree with your opinion. Still, I stand for your right to express yourself freely.” A group outside, visible through the Mies van der Rohe building’s glazed façade, pulls open a large banner behind him: “STAATSRÄSON IST GENOZID”, referring to Germany’s official policy – its “reason of state” – of unflinching support for Israel. Museum staff arrange their bodies in a comical attempt to block the sign while Klaus pushes on, eventually conceding to the chants emerging from the canopy of keffiyehs and Palestinian flags.

He will return later, when the crowds have dispersed, with a puzzling speech describing how he turned 20 in Israel, how he met Nan in 1992, how he was a caregiver for Susan Sontag in 2004, how Susan taught him to “be unafraid”.

I think it takes a certain blinkered arrogance for a museum director to give a rebuttal to an artist’s remarks at their opening – an unprecedented act, as far as I know. I’m not sure this is the fearlessness Sontag had in mind. It is perverse for the person representing the state institution to claim that he, and not the artist speaking truth to power, is modelling courage. Or for him to describe Nan’s fury at the genocide in Gaza, and her call for introspection and action, as “opinion” – as if this might be dismissed as simple disagreement.

There are people who will go on to claim that the audience is silencing or even “censoring” Klaus by shouting him down, but I think that Klaus is not speaking so much as parroting the senescent propaganda of Staatsräson, the version of history that floats undisturbed through the technocratic ventilation systems, a malevolent spirit seeking new host bodies. I am aware on some level that Klaus has also done something unique and acted as an institutional buffer so that Nan could speak at all, so that the show could go on. I am aware that the protesters’ shouts are an incantation against the spell of the state.

Nan and I and a few friends slip away and take an elevator down to an empty loading dock behind the museum.

“How was it?” she asks, her voice trembling as she offers me a cigarette. “I hate talking in public.” She lights hers, takes a drag. “I usually don’t show up. You know that?”

“You’re a hero, Nan.”

“Oh man,” she says, dragging again. “I’m going to be in a lot of trouble after this one.”

*

I was in Berlin because Nan asked me to be there. She asked me to be there, I think, because I understand something about the shape of the situation. She had been preparing her remarks for weeks, and this is not the kind of thing you do alone. I’ve found myself in trouble alongside Nan before, trying to change things that seem impossible to change until you do, and I feel bonded to her. It’s strange enough to be a screen for others’ projections, which we are all the time in daily life. It is stranger still to know the queasy feeling of exposure that comes when you’re briefly shot into the vertiginous penumbra of history.

From October 2005 until October 2023, I worked at Artforum, the glossy, monthly scripture of contemporary art. For many, the magazine was the North Star of criticism – a peerless instrument of canonisation. For an artist, landing the cover was a consecration. People collected them: a row of the magazine’s totemic spines on a bookshelf signalled sophistication. (An Artforum on Edward Cullen’s Barcelona couch in the movie Twilight quickly establishes his urbanity.) I was editor-in-chief for the last six of those years, and during that time I witnessed history’s quickening: a #MeToo scandal at the magazine** **that resulted in the resignation of a disgraced publisher; protests at the Whitney Museum that provoked a rare surrender of a board member; the global standstill of Covid-19; the flash of white consciousness around Black oppression in the summer of 2020; Israel’s assault on Gaza during the Unity uprising in May of 2021; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. A sympathetic friend dubbed me the “crisis editor”. I took for granted that Artforum’s project was imbricated with the politics of the left, and ran the magazine on that basis; as a result, I sometimes heard people call it “Wokeforum”.

The fact that I refer to Artforum’s “project” at all reveals the grandiosity that is one of the art world’s key features, the soil for its spectacular financialisation – its unparalleled ability to transform radicalism into capital. This grandiosity was inflected in much of the bright and lofty material that we published. The stakes were high; we believed we were writing history, and we often were. Compared with my predecessors, my tenure as editor-in-chief was marked by a greater appetite for protest, for using our position to intensify pressure on institutions, to force real structural change. In some ways, this was a continuation of strategies of protest and institutional critique among artists we admired, from Adrian Piper and Hans Haacke to Andrea Fraser. But as time went on, our targets were becoming clearer, our tactics more refined.

I thought I knew how to move within the contradictions. I was not fired when I published, in my first issue as editor, the portfolio that launched Nan’s campaign targeting the Sackler family – prominent art-world patrons whose names were inscribed at the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre and the Guggenheim – for their role in the opioid crisis. I was not fired when I commissioned “The Tear Gas Biennial”, a fiery polemic that cinched the departure of Warren Kanders, CEO of the weapons manufacturer Safariland, as vice-chairman of the Whitney Museum’s board. I was not fired in June 2020 when I posted calls on Artforum’s social media channels to donate to bail funds and defund the police.

There has been plenty of controversy in Artforum’s history. In 1974, the artist Lynda Benglis presented an ad featuring herself nude and holding a double dildo between her legs, a gesture that inspired a split in the editorial department and the subsequent founding of the journal October. A decade later, Thomas McEvilley’s article “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief”, a searing critique of the “Primitivism” show at the Museum of Modern Art, occasioned an impassioned back-and-forth between the curators and the critic about art history’s colonial underpinnings, instigating a new phase of critical discourse. (As one of the magazine’s publishers was fond of telling me, we didn’t report the news, we *were *the news.) Controversy, the invigorating expression of oppositional positions, telegraphs health. We were modernists, after all. Risk and dissent were our sun and moon. Editors didn’t just survive controversies; they made their names with them. We knew that conflict is the engine of that eternal hysteria called “relevance”. As far as I know, prior editors left when they got bored or ran out of things to say. I was the ninth editor in the magazine’s 60-plus-year history, and the first to be fired for something I did. It is no surprise that this something concerned Palestine.

*

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well / photo courtesy David Velasco

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well / photo courtesy David Velasco

On 19 October 2023, I authorise the publication of an open letter from culture workers in support of Palestinian liberation and a ceasefire in Gaza. Twelve days have passed since Palestinians broke through the heavily fortified border walls surrounding the Gaza Strip, killing around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 251. Already, more than 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliation.

I am in Paris for the opening of a major art fair, and I have spent the past week-and-a-half reaching out to contributors I hoped could rise to the occasion. I am experiencing profound alienation. In the art world you become accustomed to cognitive dissonance, but I am running up against my limits. At the fair, everything is proceeding as normal – invitations to dinners and parties, the rich swapping stories and resources. Almost no one speaks about Gaza. Those who do mostly take Zionist sympathies for granted: of course your passion is for the murdered and kidnapped Israelis, of course you condemn Hamas.

The letter is drafted by a group of anonymous individuals who decide not to take these sympathies for granted. When a colleague shares it with me, it feels obvious that the magazine should respond with solidarity instead of analysis. It feels obvious that we should do so quickly. We know that we are in one of those strange and extraordinary periods when collective action has more purchase. My colleague asks if they can use my name when approaching Nan about signing the letter, and I say yes, and sign it as well. In no time at all, the group collects some 8,000 signatures – many of whom are major artists and contributors to the magazine – which they cap just prior to publication.

As I am negotiating the letter, a missile hits a courtyard of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing hundreds of people who were sheltering there. Later we will find it quaint to recall that, at the time, Israel claimed that a failed Palestinian rocket launch caused the explosion, and that most newspapers take the word of the “most moral army in the world”. In the months to come, Israel will kill tens of thousands of Palestinians and demolish nearly all the hospitals in the Gaza Strip. We will find it hard to imagine a time when anyone could believe that Israel wouldn’t target civilians and hospitals. We will find it hard to imagine that, at the time of the letter’s publication, the principal objection was that it focused on Palestinian suffering, and that it refused to invoke or condemn Hamas.

Shortly after we publish the letter, all hell breaks loose. My phone, once a conduit for benign distractions, acquires the menacing nimbus of a grenade. In the car from Newark airport, I take a call from the head publicist of Penske Media, the company that acquired Artforum a year earlier, who implores me to do something acknowledging “the other side”. Our Instagram post about the letter becomes a flashpoint, generating more than 15,000 likes in a handful of hours – far more than any other post in our history. The comments feed is flooded with emojis of Palestinian flags, but also accusations of antisemitism and calls to unsubscribe. In an unprecedented move, the publishers go above the heads of the editorial department and take down the Instagram post. They remove the letter itself from the magazine’s homepage and briefly make it invisible in the search function, so that to find it you need a direct link. Shortly afterwards, they stop responding to my messages.

We begin to receive texts and emails from artists and curators asking to have their names removed from the list of signatories. There are some predictable figures – major artists with less experience in activism – as well as a few sad surprises. Some explain that they can’t be associated with anything that doesn’t explicitly condemn Hamas; others say they’re afraid for their jobs and careers. Each lost name is another chink in the armour of collective action. Some have the dignity to write to me directly; others employ expensive art PR teams. (“_____’s name is apparently still on the signatory list. He is asking that his name be removed immediately**.**”)

Some collectors are calling up individual artists who signed, threatening to sell off their works or stonewall exhibitions by refusing to lend to museums. Gallerists tell me and my artist friends that patrons are threatening not to fund exhibitions or buy work from anyone who signed. Messages from a WhatsApp group of Zionist collectors and gallerists called “Art World for Israel” are leaked, revealing an organised strategy of intimidation targeting artists who signed the letter. There seems to be a particularly vindictive ire toward the Jewish artists who spoke up to support the Palestinian cause – Goldin, Tai Shani, Candice Breitz, Nicole Eisenman. Museum board members pressure institutional leaders to distance themselves from the letter and raise the idea of deaccessioning works of Palestinian artists. A team of dealers and collectors writes a counter-letter, which is signed by artists such as Marina Abramović and Richard Prince, and publishes it in full-page ads in The New York Times, Le Monde and The Wall Street Journal. I have never seen anything like this. If this is the response, then the letter must really matter.

On the day that I am fired, I am offered a choice. It’s a little before noon on 26 October when I meet with Jay Penske, the youthful CEO of Penske Media. We are at the company’s New York headquarters, an airless sepulchre of corporate banality in a prewar office building on Fifth Avenue. Jay is friendly as we speak, a practised inquisitor. “You have good friends,” he says with some amusement, referring to a letter, composed by the filmmaker Laura Poitras and signed by some big names, petitioning to keep me on board.

He asks me to walk him through my decision, which I do, carefully. I tell him that I felt, and still feel, that the magazine needed to respond to the moment. I had consulted the editorial staff and had reached out to contributors. No one felt they had the authority to write about 7 October and its aftermath. I had watched the agile responses of several magazines that I trusted, and the clumsy nonresponses of nearly every other publication. I contemplated various savvy “art world” takes, all of which seemed specious. In Paris, one of our contributors brought the letter to my attention, and I told them we would publish it, which, as editor-in-chief, is literally my prerogative. I did this swiftly, in consultation with the web team and our international reviews editor, who were entirely on board.

Jay asks me why I signed the letter, and I explain that we’re not a newspaper, but a leftist art publication. People should know where we stand on genocide, and why not? What kind of interest are we protecting? He tells me about the tricky situation the publishers are in. We’ve all been spammed with threatening calls and emails, many from people we’ve never heard of. (“The artists and other persons whose names appear as signatories and supporters of this shameless letter have no soul in their hearts,” preaches Gil Brandes from Tel Aviv.) The art dealer Marianne Boesky writes a letter: “This is appalling to me as a Jew and I need Artforum to remove all Boesky ads from Artforum’s platforms immediately.” I am told that the Chanel Culture Fund has demanded that we stop the presses in order to pull their ad from our November issue. (We didn’t comply.) The gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan has written a rebuttal, which I agree to publish online because it seems worth having a public record of the surreal moral universe it represents.

I am aware that much of the sentiment is divided by class: the letters’ signatories are mostly artists, the letters’ detractors are mostly their dealers and collectors. This is not a new rift in the art world, but Palestine seems to have deepened it beyond repair. Jay tells me that the magazine’s publishers are putting together a statement, and he asks me to write something describing my missteps, something I could post on Artforum’s website and to my personal Instagram. “And if I say no?” I ask. “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” he tells me.

I walk downtown to clear my head. What can I say? I don’t like the barely veiled threat, and I’m not sorry. Two weeks earlier, I cringed watching Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, post an apology for an Instagram story stating that Israel cutting off Gazans’ access to water and power “is the most inhuman thing I’ve seen in my life”. To me it’s simple: my job is to position the magazine correctly in the current of history. We have done the right thing.

My phone rings. It’s Jay. He sounds panicked. “Someone has tipped off The New York Times,” he says. “We need to accelerate your statement.”

“I can’t produce something on this timeline,” I reply.

“I’m very disappointed to hear that,” he says. “I had really hoped this would work out.” He hangs up.

A colleague at the magazine calls next. “Are you really going to throw everything away?” he asks. “Over this?”

“I’m not the one doing the throwing,” I say.

“The letter wasn’t even a success,” he says. “Look, it’s divided the art world.”

“I think we have different ideas of success.”

*

That night, at 7:39 PM, I am at home when I receive an email from one of the two publishers with the subject line “Your Employment”. The phrasing is evasive, but the message is clear: “Dear David, I was disheartened to learn that you did not respond to Jay this afternoon, we are therefore assuming that you have decided to leave your role.” I start to respond that I most definitely have not “decided to leave my role”. A minute later, the magazine’s website posts a statement from the publishers saying that the letter’s publication “was not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process”. Few people know “editorial process” better than I do – the “process”, after all, ended at my door. The sudden invention of phantom procedures is one of the more despicable attempts to disguise my firing as a matter of protocol rather than politics.

My termination is immediate; there is no settlement. I will be paid through the week and no more. It is 18 years to the day since I began at the magazine. Later that night, The New York Times publishes a story about my firing, kicking off another media storm. Nearly a third of the Artforum editorial staff resigns and 700 writers sign on to a boycott of the magazine. More editors will follow in the coming weeks. In every way that counts, the magazine as we knew it is over. The era of Vichy Artforum begins.

Of course, I’m not alone. Shortly after my firing, Jazmine Hughes, a prominent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is forced to resign after signing an open letter condemning the genocide. Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a Black editor-at-large at Vogue, resigns after an Instagram post condemning Israel as an apartheid state. Michael Eisen, the editor-in-chief of eLife, a prominent science journal, is let go for retweeting a satirical article from The Onion: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”. The actress Melissa Barrera is fired from Scream 7, Susan Sarandon is dropped from her agency for speaking at a rally, and CAA agent Maha Dakhil apologises and endures a Stalinesque “re-education” after reposting an image stating, simply, “You’re currently learning who supports genocide.” Two years later, the fever of this repressive moment will largely be forgotten.

Billionaire donors run “doxxing trucks” around campuses featuring faces of people who protested Israel’s assault, and state officials study lists generated by the Canary Mission, a ghoulish conclave that targets student activists. The presidents of major universities are called before congress to testify. Their limp acts of contrition fail to satisfy the establishment’s thirst for blood, and Harvard’s Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s M. Elizabeth Magill resign. We’ve been quick to label all this “McCarthyism”, but in truth, the fallout, which outrages the popular conscience, signals a vaster and more insidious repression.

The crackdown is international: across Europe, there are whispers and then headlines about artists, writers and curators losing residencies, sales and even jobs.** **An awards ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli is cancelled in the weeks following 7 October. The city of Bremen and other sponsors of the Hannah Arendt Prize withdraw their support when its recipient, the Russian-American writer M. Gessen, publishes an essay in The New Yorker comparing Gaza to the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe. Friends in Berlin in particular report an atmosphere of absolute censorship and policing, and across Germany, foreign nationals are threatened with deportation for showing solidarity with Palestine. The stealth punishments are perhaps the most pernicious: the jobs not offered, the sales not made. They contribute to an ambient fear that persists in people’s minds. The resulting silence is the only sign of its efficacy.

*

Sam McKinniss: *Nan Goldin’s Press Conference *(2025) / courtesy of the artist

I don’t know why I thought we were an exception. Maybe because sometimes we were. Artforum, for many years, was about as leftist as an elite publication could get. We really did play a role in holding weapons manufacturers and the engineers of the opioid crisis to account. We really did give jobs and bylines to some singular and brilliant people. We really were a brainy refuge of weird glamour married to principle, and sometimes I wonder if mine is the last generation to grow up thinking of the art world as a place for ungovernable outsiders and talented eccentrics, which doesn’t hear the word ‘art’ and think immediately of commerce.

For me, and for many of my friends, art once seemed to offer a kind of promise. I grew up poor, brown and queer in Oregon, but I was still privileged enough to make it to a fancy college, where I looked for ways to orient myself amid unfamiliar codes of inclusion and exclusion. A young gay friend – an artist who made careful, exquisite paintings and sculptures, and whose ambition eventually yielded to his anarchic politics – exposed me to Portland’s small but vivid art scene. Here you could open a gallery or independent-minded bookstore, encourage strange and talented people to pursue their passions, and invite revolutionary thought into your life. I began to consider art a home for ideas and rebellion, a way to be yourself outside the stultifying halls of academia.

Those were the years when I encountered Adrian Piper, the Black conceptual artist who made politically incisive work with heart, who in 1970 withdrew a piece from the New York Cultural Center to protest against the US invasion of Cambodia, and in the early 1980s taught “funk lessons” to college students to exorcise xenophobia. I read the words of artists like David Wojnarowicz, who enraged senators with his scathing communiques about our genocidal indifference to AIDS. I learned about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the sentimental minimalist who, in 1988, made a work called “Forbidden Colors”: four solid-colour paintings – red, black, green and white – installed side by side, evoking the Palestinian flag. (At the time, the colours were banned from being displayed together in the occupied territories.)

In New York, I fell in love with an artist who showed me Nan Goldin’s honest depictions of beautiful, untamed people who we believed shared our DNA. I learned to write about art to impress him, and in 2005 I landed a job as an editorial assistant on Artforum’s website. I discovered a fortunate alchemy: qualities that were liabilities in my early life could be transformed into clout through the magic of identity politics. My leftist orientations were tolerated and sometimes even rewarded. I was paid for my ideas, and flown to faraway places to write about biennials with themes inspired by Marx, Fanon and Aimé Césaire. I pictured cracks in the corridors of power.

I’m not yet cynical enough to think that the cracks were simply illusions. In the wake of what quickly came to be known as the “Artforum letter”, some of us were surprised to find that we were being asked to sacrifice something. For years we had been signing petitions for all kinds of social causes, calls for liberation – feminism, queer rights, climate justice, abolition – that were often taken up by the institutions that housed us. Until 2025, nearly every museum had a gay pride celebration. When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, a parade of museums frantically marshalled committees of sacrificial minorities, staged unctuous exhibitions and asserted their commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.

Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives. Instead, the opposite: in June 2025, the Whitney Museum “suspended” its 57-year-old Independent Study Program after some of its members dared to host a performance critical of Israel. The art world, with all its progressive scaffolding and humanist ornamentation, practically designed to celebrate and aestheticise every rebellion, couldn’t metabolise Palestine. It still can’t.

*

It’s October 2025, nearly a year after Nan’s “scandal” at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and she is in Milan to celebrate the penultimate stop of her retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca, an old manufacturing plant retrofitted into a vast exhibition space. The chilly claustrophobia of the Berlin show is replaced with a warm sense of possibility. In the streets, more than a million Italians are striking in solidarity with the people of Gaza and the Global Sumud Flotilla. A tentative ceasefire is on the horizon, and Nan meets supporters everywhere she goes.

She has spent the past year making the most of every available platform. In July, during the opening of the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, she and the writer Édouard Louis spoke about Palestine activism in front of 2,500 well-heeled attendees in an ancient Roman amphitheatre. The Milan version of This Will Not End Well includes a brutal montage called Gaza: Notes on a Genocide 2023-2025, a “work in progress” comprising unsparing footage from friends and journalists of explosions, starvation and forced displacement.

Nan’s persistence has won her many fans, but it has come with a cost. “Personally, my career tanked,” she told Mahmoud Khalil in an interview with *Dazed *in September. “My market tanked from one day to the next because of my support of Palestine.” The German press responded to her speech with universal savagery. The conservative daily Die Welt called it “undoubtedly the saddest, most undignified, and most shameful moment in the 56-year history of the Neue Nationalgalerie”, and Klaus Biesenbach told Der Spiegel the night was a “horror”, and the artist’s words were “hard to bear”. “I never thought Nan would be so cold,” he said.

The past two years have given the lie to any wisdom that the art world constitutes the progressive avant-garde. I can count acts of bravery from less-visible artists, but a fog of silence continues to dominate the field: few expressions of solidarity forthcoming from institutions, and too few artists willing to speak out via social media, much less their own work. What do we make of this depressing amalgam of fear and apathy? How many will it take to break the art world’s attitude of mute acquiescence?

I am struck by the fact that major celebrities seem more likely than major contemporary artists to publicly express support for the Palestinian cause. The musician Lorde lights the stage at Madison Square Garden in red, white and green. The actress Jennifer Lawrence tells reporters: “What’s happening is no less than a genocide and it’s unacceptable”. Joaquin Phoenix, Olivia Coleman and thousands more sign a boycott of Israeli film groups “implicated in genocide”. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem make regular statements, and Hannah Einbinder shouts “Free Palestine” as she accepts her Emmy. These are not simply symbolic gestures, but meaningful demonstrations of solidarity.

“The more of us there are, the more of us there are,” Nan said at the end of her speech. She understands that we pierce repression with a surplus of reparative and disruptive actions. More voices, more collective, louder, riskier. She understands that we make change not through holding ideologically correct or coherent beliefs, but through an uneven accretion of strategic and local decisions. Not everyone has to make the same choices. Certainly not everyone has to agree. But we all have to act.

I have spent the past two years on unofficial hiatus from the official art world. Its ceremonial sound and fury feel remote to me. Speculation has been hollowing art out for decades, and we might simply have passed a threshold where price is the only measure of worth. But I’m alert enough to know that the era of unbridled conspicuous consumption might be ending. The proverbial bubble has burst. Collectors are disposing of their minions and concierges. Galleries are closing, or having less lavish parties. Artists at every level are feeling the burn. It’s only appropriate, now that the uneasy truce between the market and its playthings has been scuttled. Brute reality tore the mast from the boat.

None of this is “complicated”, as the boilerplate from strategic wafflers would have you believe. As I write this, dim leaders celebrate the supposed end to this “war”. Those who couldn’t admit to a genocide now begin to speak of it in the past tense. We’re roughly 11 weeks into a supposed ceasefire, which Israel breaks daily with routine barbarism. As I write this, IDF soldiers continue their enduring project of annexation and extermination in the West Bank. A politics of wilful ignorance and escalating stupidity keeps the killing machines going. The writing can’t keep pace. Every minute there’s another atrocity tidily packaged as a sedate number in a headline. At least 70,000 Palestinians have been murdered, but these are the underreported official counts. Around 30 percent of these have been children, with an estimated average of 28 children killed each day since October 2023. More than 98 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged or made inaccessible, or both. It’s increasingly hard to hold in mind the scale of devastation. It’s increasingly hard to care about the fate of an art world narcotised by money and self-regard. We had a chance to at least try and make a difference. We had a chance to not sell ourselves out. We had a chance, and we blew it. This did not end well, and still we can choose to begin again, tilting – collectively, contingently – toward the pitch of liberation.

We use only essential cookies necessary for site function and rely on a consent-free analytics tool to understand readership, ensuring your privacy is protected and your experience is uninterrupted. Learn more here.