How Gaza broke the art world
JVL Introduction
A retrospective for world renowned photographer and activist, Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well, opened in Berlin in November 2024.
Censored by its promoter, the Neue Nationalgalerie, Goldin remarked in her opening speech:
“Why did I feel I have to talk tonight? 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.”
Artforum has been the world’s premier art magazine for a long time and David Velasco worked there from October 2005, later becoming editor-in-chief.
He took risks. As he says, he was not fired for publishing the portfolio that launched the campaign against the Sackler family for its role in the opioid crisis; nor was he fired he posted calls on Artforum’s social media channels to donate to bail funds and defund the police.
But, “On 19 October 2023, I authorise the publication of an open letter from culture workers [signed by 8,000] in support of Palestinian liberation and a ceasefire in Gaza.”
As Velasco explains in this long, fascinating account of how the artworld works: “All hell broke loose.”
Palestine is still a no-go area. Velasco and Artforum had crossed a line. After a week of desultory discussion, waiting for Velasco to reverse his editorial decision to publish, he was summarily sacked:
“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.
________
Thanks to Equator magazine for permission to repost this article.
For those who don’t know it, Equator is a relatively new high quality magazine of politics, culture and art. You might like to read Our Monstrous Ideas by Natalia Ginzburg; Surrealism Against Fascism by Naomi Klein; Inside the BBC’s Gaza Fiasco by Daniel Trilling; Beyond the Apocalypse by Amitav Ghosh; and so much else besides.
Make sure to bookmark Equator.
RK
This article was originally published by Equator on Mon 22 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
How Gaza broke the art world
The former editor of Artforum, fired in the wake of 7 October, reckons with two years of division, fear and silence
Loading article text…
This is a superb article and thank you so much for printing it.
Painful reading, incredibly important. When the state insists that art and politics be divorced — that artists must stop protesting against an enormous ongoing crime — this is precisely the moment when the need for public protest becomes urgent and pressing, overriding every other consideration.
Superb and courageous of Velasco as he exposes the hypocrisy of the hierarchy that run our art institutions. Art is supposedly apolitical (unless made clearly obvious by its maker) but a reality is that our art institutions – particularly our galleries – contribute significantly to the country’s status which, in turn, affects and bolsters behind-the-scenes business and profit-making possibilities and status – all of which exposes a fundamental contradiction in that real art should be spontaneous rather than forced to be bound to culture and materialism.