How Gaza Broke the Art World, David Velasco (Equator, December 2025)
“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 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.
[…]
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.”
Free Palestine.
