The Art World After Epstein

"We knew everything we needed to know about the art world before the Epstein Files dropped. Before heinous allegations against Museum of Modern Art trustee Leon Black emerged, or School of Visual Arts chair David A. Ross's sympathetic endorsement of Epstein came out, we knew about the intimate connections between institutional heads and donors and trustees. The exchanges of money, donations, or favors that bind them."

""The culture that Jeffrey Epstein represents is deeply embedded in the art establishment power structures that force themselves onto the rest of us, creating dynamics that exploit, degrade, and turn us all into cynics," Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian writes. He asks all of us in the art world to return to that fundamental question: Who are we making art for? What are we willing to give up?"

"We're living in a world where - speaking of evil billionaires - the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post just laid off 300 people, including its Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee. But Vartanian's piece refuses pessimism - the old and defeated adage that the system has always and therefore will always be this way. Democracy dies in darkness, as the tagline of a once-venerated newspaper goes. Let's make our way into the light."

Epstein revelations exposed intimate ties between museum trustees, donors, and institutional heads, revealing exchanges of money, donations, and favors. Calls urge empowering arts leaders to refuse funding from corrupt individuals and to champion civic leaders worthy of public trust. Major media upheavals, including the Washington Post laying off 300 employees and losing its Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, underscore pressures on cultural coverage under billionaire ownership. A countermovement rejects pessimism and seeks to dismantle entrenched power structures that exploit and degrade cultural life. Editors recommend art books ranging from Montmartre histories to monographs by contemporary Indigenous and deaf artists.

Read at Hyperallergic