Before 2024 even began, and arguably even before October 7, 2023, the art world was split on Israel and Palestine. But this year, the schism widened even further, until there was no room for nuanced debate. Suspicions of antisemitism and anti-Palestine sentiment proliferated in all corners, and looking to museums for guidance surely left some disappointed. Cultural institutions worldwide, from the Noguchi Museum in New York to Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, and to Qatar’s Mathaf, were accused in 2024 of censoring artists and curators based, in many cases, on their pro-Palestine politics.
The uptick in accusations was so dramatic in America that in March, the New York–based National Coalition Against Censorship launched the Art Censorship Index, an online tool that tracks the state of freedom of expression across the country.
Censorship may seem black and white: an artwork is either altered or removed because of its politics, the thinking goes, and if the politics aren’t the issue, that piece wasn’t censored. But the reality is more complex, as accusations of censorship can be tricky, from a legal standpoint, and rulings are often at the discretion of a mercurial cultural climate. The index defines censorship as incidents in which institutions “expressly canceled, withdrew, or abandoned a program or work after plans to present it had been communicated, and where the reason for the withdrawal was related to the perceived political content of the work, the personal politics of the artist, or the national or cultural associations tied up in the content of the work.” The key word here is “perceived.”
In one of the year’s highest-profile incidents, a group of artists pulled their artworks from a show of textiles at the Barbican Centre in London. The removal was a protest of the Barbican’s decision to no longer host a London Review of Books lecture on the historical connections between the Holocaust and Israel’s assault on Gaza.
According to the Barbican, the decision to withdraw from the talk made after the LRB “prematurely” publicized the event and its title, meaning that the Barbican management did not have time “to do the careful preparation needed for this sensitive content.” In a statement to the Art Newspaper, Yto Barrada, one of the artists participating in the protest, said the decision was indicative of the “creeping normalization of censorship across art institutions.”
Artist-activist Nan Goldin, a vocal critic of the Israel’s war on Gaza, made one of the year’s most publicized censorship accusations in Germany, a country at the center of several legislative controversies surrounding criticism of Israel in the arts. In December, Goldin alleged that Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie had initially refused to allow her to add a statement about people killed in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank by Israel to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her seminal 1985 slideshow of photographs, which appears in a survey staged by the institution.
According to Goldin, the statement initially read, “In solidarity with the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. And with the Israeli civilians who were killed on October 7.” Goldin called it censorship; the museum disagreed, responding in the German press that the issue was that Goldin’s initial statement was not approved because it did not mention the Israeli October 7 victims. Klaus Biesenbach, the museum’s director, said in an interview with journalist Hanno Hauenstein that, “The museum stands by the fact that artists have a right to freedom of expression as long as it complies with our Code of Conduct.” The slide was ultimately updated to include a mention of Israel, and put on view.
The year’s mounting censorship controversies ultimately—and inevitably—created a crisis of faith at these institutions, which purportedly exist as repositories of history. If museums can’t be trusted to tell our stories, who can? These concerns exceeded even the question of Palestine. In November, for example, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the Biden-appointed Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, directed the National Archives to alter photographic exhibits that focused on civil rights in the US. Among the most controversial orders was the removal of portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and images taken by Dorothea Lange photographs of Japanese American incarceration camps, the latter having been deemed “too negative.”
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, a spokesperson for Shogan’s department said the changes were an attempt to make the show more relatable to general visitors. Ai Weiwei—whose gallery, Lisson, delayed his show after he tweeted critically of Israel—also made headlines for saying censorship in the West is “sometimes even worse” than in Mao’s China. Citing, in part, the crackdown on pro-Palestine expression on US college campuses, he told the Art Newspaper that, “In the context of censorship in the West, there was a prevailing illusion that the West embodied greater freedom of speech and press, portraying itself as a society with minimal censorship. Yet, I believe that censorship persists wherever there is power.”
