Look Who's Suddenly Interested in Free Speech
What's the art world coming to? It's like you can't even implicitly call for the genocide of the Jews anymore.
On October 19, Artforum published “An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations.” “We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes,” it read. It drew 8,000 signatures, including from art world luminaries such as Nan Goldin, Peter Doig, and Kara Walker.
The letter baldly omitted any mention of Hamas or the terrorist organization’s butchering of 1,400 Israelis. A response appeared in Erev Rav on October 21, also widely undersigned. “By omission, they are legitimizing the abduction of civilians,” it read. “By ignoring the rights of all who live in Israel, it is as if those who signed the letter are dehumanizing all of those who live in Israel, the 9 million people who have a right to exist.”
An October 23 addendum to the Artforum letter read, “While we cannot recirculate the petition to all 8,000 signatories, we, the group that authored the petition—as well as a number of the signatories who have reached out in recent days—would like to repeat that we reject ‘violence against all civilians, regardless of their identity,’ and share revulsion at the horrific massacres of 1400 people in Israel conducted by Hamas on October 7th.”
On October 26, a statement was posted by the publishers of Artforum, saying that the letter was published in a manner “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.” The publishers noted, “We want to make clear that we unequivocally condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, and we are distraught at the immense destruction and suffering of the civilians in Gaza.”
Later that day the New York Times reported that Artforum had fired its senior editor of six years, David Velasco. “I’m disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure,” he told the Times by email. Cecilia Vicuña, a Chilean poet and signatory of the Artforum letter, commented, “Tampering with the opinions of artists is to not understand the role of art” and that she valued “the right to freedom of speech.”
On October 27, the Times reported further that several Artforum staffers had quit in protest of Velasco’s removal. Nicole Eisenman and Nan Goldin, two of the most prominent signatories of the letter, announced that “they would no longer work with Artforum.” Goldin told the Times, “I have never lived through a more chilling period. People are being blacklisted. People are losing their jobs.” She added, “Whatever position we took was our right to free speech. I have no plans to work with Artforum because they fired someone for whom I have enormous respect.”1
Here is a list of assaults upon free speech, free expression, and free association in the visual arts that have taken place in the last three years which resulted neither in resignations of protest, nor declarations by prominent artists that they would never again work with the institutions or businesses or persons responsible:
During that time the art community petitioned for two boycotts. One was a call by 1,000 Canadian artists and cultural workers for a cultural boycott of Israel. The other was a call by 600 culture workers to boycott the Zabludowicz Art Trust for its ties to Israel. The same cultural community staged protests against the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art for staging an exhibition that was expressly concerned with the issue of free speech.
Three years ago, activists and media figures were claiming that the collocation “All Lives Matter” was hate speech. To shift the focus of the moment from anti-black racism to any wider concern was supposedly racist. People lost their jobs over it. Now subscribers to those same politics find themselves unable to articulate a free-standing, unqualified condemnation of antisemitism or the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7. One of them, Dread Scott, took to Hyperallergic to argue, pathetically, that it was “dehumanizing” to ask him to do so. Now to keep the focus of the moment upon antisemitism and not discuss the wider concerns is supposedly racist.
The point is not that there’s a double standard at work, although there is. As I’ve written before, the whole point of postliberal progressivism is to situate yourself on the easy side of the double standard, demanding probity, nuance, forgiveness, and impeccable standards from your enemies while you make serial declarations and conduct yourself like a vengeful twit. The tonal similarity between Dread Scott’s essay and, to pick something, the 2021 idiotic screed undersigned by the moniker Cancel Galleries is striking.
Rather, the point is that postliberal progressivism, the ascendant politics in the art world, is a pollution of traditional progressive priorities with anti-Western bile, totalitarianism, and old-fashioned Judenhass. If you’re a principled feminist, you should be spitting mad to see your fellow travelers glorifying Hamas’s rape culture. Homosexuals and their defenders should be excoriating the ridiculous Queers for Palestine phenomenon. Jews who have long supported art institutions that spoke up on behalf of justice for George Floyd and Ukrainian sovereignty but fell silent when 1,400 of their brethren in Israel were theatrically murdered, for being Jews, should end memberships and discontinue donations.
Hamas, to pick one instance of many, invaded the home of a family of four, gouged the eye out of the father, sliced a breast off of the mother, cut a leg off of the daughter, amputated fingers off of the son, executed all of them, then served themselves a meal at their table amidst the carnage. 8,000 art-world signatories learned of these atrocities and others and replied, what about the Palestinians? The wider world, progressives and otherwise, should be aware that the art world is infested with Jew-hating filth, and people, including many Jews, who failed the easiest moral test of their lives.
Was David Velasco canceled? It’s an interesting question, and one that I as an opponent of cancel culture have a responsibility to answer. If Velasco had signed his own pro-Hamas letter and published it in Artforum, it would have been a different story. As it is he made the publishers, and the magazine itself, look as though they had taken a position that they had not. I would oppose his firing if it was for his opinion, but there’s no compelling reason for the magazine to suffer Velasco’s egregious editorial judgment. In any case I don’t support a counter-cancel campaign in which we visit undue consequences upon all those who would cancel us, no matter how richly they deserve it. Of course, anyone who revels in the deaths of Jews is garbage and no one should be obliged to associate with them. But to call for, to use Goldin as an example, a ceasefire, in ignorance of the fact that Hamas violated a ceasefire in the first place, is the kind of bad thinking that we need exposed to the sunlight of reason so we can dispel it.
Instead I endorse an immediate and total disregard of the informal but viciously enforced speech codes of postliberal progressivism of recent times. I’ll start: anyone discussing the word nigger should just use the word. Mind you, if you call any of my friends that, we will beat your ass down. But the word as a topic should be referred to in the manner of any other foul language in the discussion. On a related note, black is lowercase again. Retarded is back on the table as a denigration. Land acknowledgments shall henceforth be answered with “Get over yourself.” Biological men who depend on my goodwill to accept that they’re women, but refer to my people as “irredeemable excrement,” such as Dr. Mika Tosca of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, should not expect my usual polite comportment. I typically go along with anyone’s adopted gender identity, but I will identify that particular tranny in any way that suits my temper. My pronouns are kick/rocks.
And most of all: All Lives Matter.
This is not, or not entirely, rudeness for its own sake. It’s recognition that the people demanding newfangled, ostensibly kinder rituals of human interaction turned around and excused express calls for my death by genocide. That’s when they weren’t issuing such calls themselves. Now they want freedom of speech! What they don’t understand is that freedom of speech is not just a right and a privilege, it is a culture in which we seek to relieve social pressure, reveal truth, and settle differences through dialogue. Like any culture, you’re not in it if you can’t act accordingly.
The success of the experiment to ensure the survival of the Jewish people by founding a dedicated homeland in former Judea has yet to be determined, and its price has been astronomical. That experiment can and must be the subject of debate. But calling it “genocidal” and an “apartheid state” and the product of “settler colonialism” is, to put it succinctly, retarded. There are progressives who question the legitimacy of no nations on earth except the United States of America and Israel. Those progressives are antisemites and they should be treated like their conservative counterparts, with revulsion.
I believe that if the institutional force and moral vehemence that went into demands for racial justice in 2020 were applied to antisemitism with the same urgency after October 7, the worldwide explosion of Jew-hatred we’re seeing now would have been dampened. All of the institutions that expressed the former and not the latter sent an implicit message, one of tacit support for the enemies of the Jews. It would have been better if they had stuck to their knitting throughout, but now the present silence contrasts with prior action. Artforum having to mop up after the antisemites and useful idiots is not ideal, but it’s something.
I have been warning art people for ten years that if you don’t advocate for the speech rights of your enemies, you will have no moral standing to condemn the attacks on the speech rights of your allies. And here we are. Velasco, in affirming his right to speak freely, couldn’t point to a track record of defending a plurality of opinion at Artforum because it never presented one. The magazine is “interwoven with the politics of the left,” as it describes itself. It now shares the fate of the left as it abandons its commitments to individual rights and is poisoned by the worst impulses of history. That’s why Velasco sounds like he’s mewling.
As Goldin says, this is indeed the most chilling time in the arts in living memory. But it has been like that for a while. She only realized it now because the chill finally blew in her direction.
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It didn’t escape my notice that the Times article concentrated on Nan Goldin and Nicole Eisenman, and didn’t solicit comment from, say, Kara Walker. Some editor seemed to realize that the letter would look even more racist than it was if they didn’t foreground its Jewish signatories and pretend that Walker wasn’t even involved.
For ten years — this is an understatement, Franklin. While I have known you for eight, I know your commitment and consistency to truth, justice, and freedom extends further, and comes from a long history within your family. And you’ve suffered for years the phenomenon of people shying away from their association with you, or only maintaining private connection because of the perceived blowback. You’ve been called a white supremacist, a fascist, and a far right trump supporter, by people who, whether naively or dishonestly, failed to understand your politics.
And while I’ve sometimes gently guided you away from using certain turns of phrase, I no longer wish for you to hold anything back. The time has passed for delicacy of any kind. As Konstantin Kisin spoke at ARC recently: we are in a fight for our lives. I rue the thought that too many people will realize, too late, that they have sacrificed their freedom for the illusion of safety, and that the fold of people seeking shelter (politically, emotionally, or physically) will bulge, with crowds who only partially understand what’s at stake. May our love not be wasted. May more eyes open to reality. I fear this is only preparation for what lies ahead.
-Your wife
The 8,000 signatories have much in common with college students burping up bigoted manure they're being fed in classrooms across the globe. College campuses and the art world are alike in their tendancy to be insulated, convoluted, incestuous little worlds having little touch with actual life. Art world denizens, not unlike college students drunk with their first taste of real personal leeway, tend to be susceptible to whatever pop notions float into their midsts, and tend, in order to gain the approbation of their peers, to hop cheerily onto bandwagons.
In my everyday world (North Central Texas) there has been nothing but speechlessness in reaction to the present grotesquery of antisemitic fervor which seems to have caught everyone here by surprise. As for those who reveal that they embrace antisemitic sentiment or any other bigotry, like those 8,000 signatories via their First Amendment rights, their names and activities should be kept before the public in every way possible. That First Amendment cuts both ways.