Over the course of a week in October, Artforum imploded.
On October 19, a little less than two weeks after Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took 240 people hostage, and as the I.D.F. fired thousands of missiles at Gaza, the art world’s most prestigious magazine published an open letter. Signed by 8,000 artists and others in creative industries—including Artforum’s editor, David Velasco; the photographer Nan Goldin; the philosopher Judith Butler; the musician Brian Eno; the writer Hari Kunzru; and the artist Barbara Kruger—it called for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and the urgent passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and described the situation as an “escalating genocide.” It did not mention Hamas or the October 7 attack on Israel. (Four days later, an addition was made to the letter, stating that the signatories “share revulsion at the horrific massacres of 1400 people in Israel conducted by Hamas on October 7th.”)
The open letter infuriated many of the art world’s power brokers, who, led by Bed Bath & Beyond scion and art collector Martin Eisenberg, quickly began a pressure campaign, urging many of the artists whose work they had purchased to remove their signatures.
These threats soon made their way to the magazine’s owner, Jay Penske, C.E.O. of Penske Media Corporation—which owns Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Rolling Stone, and Billboard—who bought Artforum in December 2022. On October 26, Penske summoned Velasco, 45, to a meeting, during which Velasco refused to walk back the letter’s publication. By the end of the workday, he had been fired, after 18 years at the magazine, with six of them at its helm.
That night, Artforum’s publishers posted a statement on the magazine’s Web site criticizing the letter’s publication as “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process,” adding that it was “widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly sensitive and complex geopolitical circumstances.”
Velasco’s senior Web editors soon quit in solidarity with him. Hundreds of Artforum’s best-known contributors, including Goldin and Kruger, signed a boycott of the publication that continues to this day. On November 8, the magazine’s remaining editorial staff published a letter describing their “shock, confusion, and anger” at Velasco’s removal.
Four months passed without an editor leading the magazine. Then, on March 14, Artforum announced a new editor, Tina Rivers Ryan, formerly the curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. In an interview with Vogue last week, Rivers Ryan said she planned “on continuing the legacy that I’m inheriting from not just my immediate predecessor, but the last few editors who have all done such good work to make Artforum a publication that is trusted and bold.”
Online, the response was relatively quiet. Some noted that Rivers Ryan had been vocally pro-Palestine on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram over the last six months, even sharing articles that compare present-day Israel to apartheid South Africa. (Rivers Ryan did not respond to AIR MAIL’s requests for comment.)
The open letter infuriated many of the art world’s power brokers, who quickly began a pressure campaign.
Meanwhile, Velasco, after being fired without severance or continued health insurance, has had to sublet his apartment at a monthly loss. He’s living out of a suitcase, couch surfing at friends’ places in New York, and gratefully allowing them to take him to dinners when they insist. “It’s a hard situation,” Velasco tells me. “There’s an idea, very understandably, that people who work in the art world have money. I grew up working-class without any support system outside of myself. When I lost my job, I didn’t have a savings account. I was paycheck to paycheck.”
For the time being, he’s writing for himself, working with the Poetry Project, and helping friends who are running a small press. Though Velasco says he’ll soon need a full-time job, he’s “very cautious about the next environment that I put my energy into.”
Kate Sutton, one of the Artforum editors who quit in solidarity with Velasco, says she’s only found temporary freelance jobs so far. None of them “pay anywhere close to what I made at Artforum.” As a single mom, “I am starting to hit panic mode.” Sources say many other staffers who quit are also struggling to find new work in a media landscape recently decimated by mass layoffs.
Drawing the Line
When Velasco decided to publish the open letter, he was concerned more about his magazine being on the right side of history, as he saw it, than what it might mean for his job: “To me, Artforum had been an independent magazine up until relatively recently, and my goal was to continue treating it like I’d been treating it.”
Penske Media claims Velasco was fired for violating the company’s editorial protocols because he didn’t notify his publishers or senior editorial staff—other than the Web editors—that the letter would be published. “There was a discussion among myself and several other editors who agreed [to publish it],” says Velasco. “We didn’t have a companywide discussion before we published it—it was an editorial discussion.” Velasco also claims there wasn’t any precedent of running editorial initiatives up the corporate chain. “I didn’t get the sense that [Penske Media] read anything that we did.” A spokesperson for Penske Media declined to answer questions from AIR MAIL, saying the company does not comment on employee matters.
Velasco took over the magazine during a different scandal. In 2017, Artforum’s longtime publisher Knight Landesman stepped down after being accused in a lawsuit of sexual harassment by nine women. (The suit was later dismissed.) His editor, Michelle Kuo, stepped down, too. Many credit Velasco with restoring the magazine’s reputation. “Under him all trust was regained, probably more trust than before,” says Dean Kissick, an art critic and editor at Spike magazine.
Velasco’s Artforum had always taken up political positions. In July 2019, he published a letter criticizing Warren Kanders, then a Whitney Museum vice-chairman, who owned a company alleged to have sold tear gas to U.S. border agents. Kanders later resigned from the Whitney’s board.
The year before, Velasco published an essay by Goldin holding the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis—a major event in a campaign that, eventually, resulted in the Sackler name being removed from the Tate, the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and other institutions. Velasco had also put the Palestinian Museum on Artforum’s summer 2021 cover.
“I didn’t get the sense that [Penske Media] read anything that [Artforum] did.”
As the Israel-Hamas war intensified, he and his staff began to think about how the magazine should react. “We knew that we couldn’t stay quiet,” says Sutton, who was involved in the publishing of the letter. Their first thought was to commission a single writer to respond, but there was concern about putting any one person into the spotlight, given the incendiary nature of the situation. So when an open letter that had already been signed by a number of Artforum cover artists was sent to Velasco, it seemed like the answer.
“When this letter came to us, full of voices of people that we respect immensely, people who’d been on our cover, people we’d considered asking to write, it seemed like a perfect opportunity,” Sutton explains.
“Artforum is a forum. It’s a place where we foreground artists’ positions,” says Velasco. “It’s a magazine of the left.” The letter was the “first place where I saw something like a consensus on the left … calling for something that, at the time, seemed very basic, and still seems very basic to me.”
Asked about the criticism that the letter didn’t mention the October 7 attack on Israel, Velasco says, “It’s not a critique. It’s a deflection. When we protested the Iraq War, we didn’t start our protests by invoking 9/11. The letter’s authors were focused on asserting that Palestinian lives matter, without condition or apology.”
“When this letter came to us, full of voices of people that we respect immensely, people who’d been on our cover, people we’d considered asking to write, it seemed like a perfect opportunity.”
The backlash came immediately. The next day, Artforum published a response from gallerists Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan calling the letter “one-sided.” Lucas Zwirner—the son of David Zwirner, and an executive across the family’s worldwide galleries—apparently agreed, writing to Dayan: “So glad you did this! We said we’d pull all ads etc.” The text, mistakenly sent to the wrong Amalia, was later leaked to Vanity Fair. (Lucas Zwirner did not respond to AIR MAIL’s requests for comment.)
Several collectors tried to shut down an Ohio exhibition of work by Jumana Manna, a Palestinian artist who had signed the open letter. Nicole Eisenman—a Guggenheim fellow who has been included in three Whitney Biennials—told The New York Times that it was “surprising to learn how many collectors believe that owning a few drawings of mine means they get to tell me what to do with my name.”
A number of artists who had originally signed the letter—including Eisenman, Peter Doig, Joan Jonas, Katharina Grosse, and Tomás Saraceno—ended up retracting their names. “In not mentioning the Hamas attack of October 7 explicitly, there was a lack of evenhandedness,” says Doig, a painter, of his retraction. “I was troubled, however, by the prosecutorial response to a mostly well-intended effort. It should not be controversial to express grave concern when confronted with the scale and breadth of suffering the Palestinian people have had to and continue to endure.”
At first, as Velasco was getting countless “irate e-mails and phone calls,” he says he found the backlash to be a demonstration of the letter’s effectiveness. “To me, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m doing something right.’ I was never shy about courting controversy if it felt like it was done with integrity and the right spirit.”
Penske Media didn’t see it the same way. “The first I heard from [Jay Penske and his P.R. team about the letter] was the day after it was published,” says Velasco. When they eventually met, Penske asked him for “some kind of mea culpa,” which he was not prepared to give. By the end of the day, he had been fired and shut out of his accounts. It was, in Velasco’s words, “a fucking strange-ass time.”
Kissick wasn’t surprised to learn of Velasco’s firing. “This feels like a consequence of selling out to a big magazine conglomerate,” he says. “It’s a sad consequence, but that’s what happens if an editor is publishing stories which cause a lot of trouble for the owners.”
Artists’ Retreat
The magazine’s first issue following Velasco’s exit was a shell of its former self, with The New York Times reporting that a “skeleton crew of editors needed to take a hacksaw through the December issue” after a number of regular contributors, including the filmmaker John Waters and the art historian Claire Bishop, demanded their features be withdrawn.
While recent issues haven’t had such obvious gaps, and the Web site has continued publishing pieces, the magazine has been abandoned by much of the community it spent decades building.
Aria Dean, an artist and former Artforum contributor, says she was “horrified” by Velasco’s firing, and that signing the boycott was a “no-brainer.” As an artist, “you don’t get to decide who reviews your show or not, but, thankfully, I haven’t had anything going on that’s drawn attention from Artforum,” says Dean.
Meanwhile, Julia Bryan-Wilson, a Columbia University professor and Guggenheim fellow, says she will “not be writing for Artforum again unless something drastic happens to restore my faith.”
“I do not read it anymore,” adds Bryan-Wilson. “It is a thin, pale shadow of what it was.”
Penske Media seems hopeful that people will quickly forget this all happened. And some in the art world have: Dean remembers scrolling through Instagram in late December and feeling deflated when “a few people who had been very like, ‘Fuck Artforum!,’ were then posting about being on [the magazine’s] year-end lists.”
Even before the Rivers Ryan announcement, the magazine was starting to fill the staffing gaps, including hiring novelist and critic Travis Jeppesen as the senior Web editor, former Frieze editor Pablo Larios to write international reviews, and former Art in America editor Rachel Wetzler as senior editor.
“I do not read [Artforum] anymore. It is a thin, pale shadow of what it was.”
Velasco admits that it has been hard to see new names taking his and his former colleagues’ jobs. Rivers Ryan “wrote some smart pieces for the magazine while I was editor,” he says. But “she talks to Vogue about ‘a chilling effect in which people are feeling like there are things that cannot be said,’” he continues. “More than six hundred of her colleagues are boycotting the company for this very reason.... It’s shameless.”
Sutton, who says she misses the “family” she used to work with, feels similarly. “It’s been difficult to hear announcements of new staff and know there is not going to be any further question of accountability.”
Artforum is far from the only creative institution drawing lines about what employees should and shouldn’t be free to say about Israel and Palestine after October 7. In Hollywood, superagent Maha Dakhil—who has represented Tom Cruise, Reese Witherspoon, and Natalie Portman—was dropped by Aaron Sorkin for calling the war a genocide, resigned from her board position at Creative Artists Agency, and temporarily stepped back as co-head of the Motion Pictures department. In New York, 92NY disinvited Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen from giving a talk after he signed an open letter critical of Israel. Condé Nast has reminded staff of its social-media policies, while Hearst Magazines has warned its employees that even liking controversial content on social media could get them fired.
The majority of the people I contacted for this story wouldn’t speak to me, including those whose names can still be found on public letters and petitions. Velasco says he’s received plenty of private support, but that “people understandably are scared and shy about exposure at this moment. I … think it’s probably wise.”
As for how Velasco is feeling now? A strange type of freedom, he says. “I don’t have to do a lot of things that I found suffocating. Artforum was my dream job. I loved the work of running a magazine; I loved working with writers; I loved working with artists. But I could not be happier to not be at the Frieze art fair in Los Angeles right now, which seems to me the least meaningful activity one could be doing at this point in time.”
Asked about his final week at Artforum, Velasco says it “helped me confirm for myself who I am and what I stand for. There’s something about standing in the middle of a storm, where a lot of people are projecting all kinds of things onto you, that removes a lot of the superficial residue of careerism. I was like, ‘Oh, O.K. Well, this is who I am.’ So it’s been clarifying. Insane and clarifying.”
Louis Cheslaw is a writer and former editor at New York magazine. He lives in London