Two long passages from David Velasco's How Gaza Broke the Art World

.

Two long passages from How Gaza Broke the Art World by David Velasco:


*


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.”


*


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.



.