Artists and Collectors Turn on Each Other

The Artforum letter was just the start.

- By Rachel Corbett

THE LETTER THAT Artforum’s website published on October 19, “An Open Letter From the Art Community to Cultural Organizations,” calling for Palestinian liberation and “an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” had already been circulating as a Google form. It had already been signed by more than 4,000 people, including Judith Butler and Fred Moten and, as David Velasco, the magazine’s editor of almost six years, put it, more artists who had made the cover of Artforum “than I’d ever seen in one space”: Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, Nicole Eisenman, Nan Goldin. “This was the first moment where it felt like there was consensus, where you had thousands of people signing something saying, ‘We can agree on this’—people who would normally find it impossible to agree on anything. So I thought, This is the beginning of a coalition,” he said. While the letter made a point to “reject violence against all civilians, regardless of their identity,” it did not mention Hamas or the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7. Velasco signed it himself.

By the next morning, the publishers were getting calls. Marianne Boesky, whose gallery’s ad happened to appear amid the petition on the website, reached out immediately, saying, “I need you to remove my name and my gallery’s brand from supporting this statement.” It flouted “the rules,” as Boesky put it, “that you must condemn Hamas before you can support any Palestinian base from being killed.” Many collectors and other dealers were also upset, and a week after publishing the letter, Velasco was fired.