After Gaza: On The Moral Collapse of the Art World
Image prompted by Efe Levent
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Contemporary art feeds on tragedy. The great crimes of history, colonialism, capitalism, genocide, and wars, are ceaselessly re-narrated through the well-worn themes of migration, memory, and identity. Practices of coexistence, decentralised resistance, gardens of otherness, critters of genocide, video arts on loss, etc. Such imagery has saturated biennials, museum exhibitions, and performance projects for decades. Picture panels titled “Healing Through Art” or “Solidarity Through Art” are held in the wake of calamities. Think of all the ink that’s spilled, the grants being distributed, and throngs of artists and academics gathering to witness flowery words about the transformative, restorative power of art.
Now pause and consider these same rituals in the shadow of the horror unfolding in Palestine. Memory-themed exhibitions, postcolonial lectures, and articles conspicuously silent on Gaza... Make no mistake: this silence will not last long. Once Gaza has been erased from the map, as Western powers envision, the aestheticized echoes of this catastrophe will quickly follow. Within months of Palestine’s annihilation, silence will be transformed into funding friendly projects, glossy catalogues, and wine-soaked openings. Violence, horror, and dehumanization will be reduced to marketable artistic tropes. Once again, we will see art choosing representation over reality.
Liberal Europe, that great patron of artists and free expression, so publicly weeping crocodile tears over authoritarian abuses in the Middle East and so attuned to the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and scholars, is also expert at building platforms, funding NGOs, and supporting exiled artists. In hosting those who cannot safely exist in their own countries, the West burnishes its image as the champion of multiculturalism and human rights. Each “other” it funds serves as an investment in its self-image. Every exiled artist is forced to become a token of their multicultural showroom.
But Palestine?
When confronted with an ongoing colonial crime in which Europe itself is complicit, the liberal conscience collapses into cowardice. Colonialism is treated as a historical artifact, something we reflect on, not something we fight against. Postcolonial theory has been hollowed out into an aesthetic marketplace; memory reduced to a curatorial gimmick. The suffering of the colonized circulates freely, but cleansed of its political urgency and stripped of context. Identity, migration, diaspora, and trauma are all rendered palatable for European institutions. They become not demands for justice, but marketable themes for biennials. To speak of colonialism today is no longer a political stance; it is a portfolio move.
This is why Palestine is the true test of the art world’s moral pretensions.
The art world's dependency on systems of funding has become the determining factor of this test in Germany, and increasingly across Europe, even the mildest gesture of solidarity with Palestine is enough to lose funding. Laws equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and banning the BDS movement are not only political instruments; they are mechanisms of cultural repression. Under this regime, the very word "Palestine" is marked as an ethical violation. Material resources, venues, exhibition spaces, and speaking platforms: all are closed to those who refuse this orthodoxy. The humanitarian ethos of the European funding system is a double bind: it offers not just money but demands ideological obedience. Deciding who is permitted to speak, whose pain is permitted to be revealed, and by whom are acts of political gatekeeping.
As the concept of representation in the Western art world shrinks into a hollow fetish for visibility, that visibility itself becomes a screen for deeper complicity. This silence is not just an abstention; it is active revisionism. Every omission of Gaza muddies the story of violence. The perpetrators fade into abstraction; the crime is displaced onto generic “Eastern violence,” patriarchal culture, or some other comfortable scapegoat. In this ambiguity, the West launders not only its present complicity but also its historical guilt. In this context, art serves the aesthetics of forgetting, not of memory. Representation becomes a mask for the perpetrator.
This silence is not merely ideological. It is structurally embedded. As art production grows ever more dependent on institutions and funding, artists are increasingly forced into working with fundable themes for survival. Projects concerned with ostensibly political themes like collectivity, memory and solidarity are easily absorbed into Europe’s self-congratulatory progressive narrative. Rebellion is welcome, but only when it is staged, circulated, and defanged. Thus, many artists become agents of system reproduction, performing dissent while shoring up the very order they claim to critique.
They collaborate not only through silence but through the sanctioned languages of resistance that institutions now require. Decolonial manifestos are penned under institutional logos, their conditions of production conveniently ignored. These works do not constitute rebellion; they aestheticize it, soften it, and render it consumable. In the end, critical art becomes a brand value, not a political force. Thus, what remains of the art world’s collective imagination is a figure that speaks for funding and falls silent for funding. Art now carries neither action nor memory. It is trapped in a feedback loop where critique is replaced by representation and representation by comfort.
And today? As thousands are slaughtered before our eyes, as children starve, as entire cities are razed, the art world remains silent. The language of “barbarians at the gates” circulates once more, clothed in the rhetoric of democracy, civilization, and humanitarian aid. Artists who challenge this narrative are banned from biennials, works referencing Palestine are removed from galleries, and funding is revoked. The art world seeks not to confront reality but to curate a selective memory.
Representation must say something different, or it is worthless. It cannot and must not substitute for the hard work of transforming material conditions. There is a reason this mode of representation is relentlessly imposed on the oppressed: it aligns perfectly with liberal morality. It pacifies. It individualizes. It confuses visibility with change and existence with spectacle. Collective struggle, structural transformation, and shared political imagination are replaced by personal success stories, festival posters, and fundable experience narratives. If art still claims any allegiance to collectivity, memory, or solidarity, then it must confront the fact that this form of representation is now entirely alien to those goals. We must ask: what does representation conceal, what does it replace, and why does it circulate so easily? We must resist its presentation as a solution, its aestheticization, and its commodification by the capitalist world order. In its current form, representation is a refined method of silencing.
The art world’s collapse is plain for all to see. Berlinale, Documenta, Tate, Goethe-Institut, and, to my knowledge, not a single collective statement from Turkish artists or institutions condemning their own state’s ongoing trade agreements with Israel can even mount a basic boycott. The art world has fully embraced the values of individualism, careerism, and cowardice. So let us state it plainly: if for artists today, survival, income, and visibility are the priority, let us stop pretending art carries some noble mission. Call it what it is: a profession, like any other, with contracts, employers, censorship, and silence. After Gaza, this responsibility remains. Anything else is a charade: a white curtain pulled across the face of catastrophe. And we all know: the curtain changes only the scene, never the truth.