Artforum Editor-in-Chief Fired Over Magazine’s Open Letter About Israel-Hamas Conflict

A week after Artforum published a widely criticized open letter calling for Palestinian liberation that didn’t mention the Hamas attacks on Israel, editor-in-chief David Velasco has been fired.

In an email to the New York Times on Thursday following his ouster, Velasco criticized the magazine, saying it “bent to outside pressure” and abandoned a commitment to “freedom of speech and the voices of artists.” Velasco added that “I have no regrets.”

Originally published Oct. 19 and as of this writing still posted on Artforum’s website, the letter’s signatories — described as “artists, writers, curators, filmmakers, publishers, and workers” — called for “Palestinian liberation” and “an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.” Velasco was among those who signed.

Among other things, it described the attacks on Gaza by Israeli military “escalating genocide,” called out an Israeli official who referred to terrorists that attacked Israel as “human animals” while announcing a “complete siege” of Gaza, and urged artists from all backgrounds to “make a public demand from our governments to call for a ceasefire.”

But the letter didn’t mention in any meaningful way the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 that sparked the current crisis. That omission led to widespread outrage and condemnation that intensified over the weekend. In response, on Monday an addendum addressing the Hamas attacks was added to the letter.

“We, the group that authored the petition—as well as a number of the signatories who have reached out in recent days—would like to repeat that we reject ‘violence against all civilians, regardless of their identity,'” the addendum said in part. “and share revulsion at the horrific massacres of 1400 people in Israel conducted by Hamas on October 7th.”

That wasn’t enough to quell the furor and after Velasco’s ouster on Thursday Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza, publishers of the Penske Media-owned magazine, disavowed the letter.

The letter, they wrote, was incorrectly seen as “a statement from the magazine,” and was published “without our, or the requisite senior members of the editorial team’s, prior knowledge. This was not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.”

The letter, they added, should “have been presented as a news item with the relevant context.” Read that statement here.

The post Artforum Editor-in-Chief Fired Over Magazine’s Open Letter About Israel-Hamas Conflict appeared first on TheWrap.