THE BIG IDEA AN ART WORLD DIVIDED
BEFORE OCTOBER 7, the contemporary-art world tended to be seen as a reliably liberal bloc, with shared values around issues of social justice including race, gender, and reproductive rights. But Hamas's attack on Israel that day and Israel's subsequent invasion of Gaza have divided artists, gallerists, curators, and other art professionals in an unprecedented manner.
Across the art world, people traded accusations of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and censorship. Pro-Palestinian protests erupted at numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Talks were disrupted; artists pulled works from shows. In one case, a group of Jewish anti-Zionist artists withdrew their pieces from San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, in part to protest funding from the Israeli government and pro-Zionist foundations. Another museum in that city, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, closed for several weeks after nine of the 30 artists in its triennial spray-painted pro-Palestinian messages onto their own works and demanded that any supporters of Zionism be removed from the board. The
