Critique or bias? The debate cleaving the art world

The Israel-Hamas conflict has caused a division in the art world with political critique being termed prejudice 

- Avantika Bhuyan

Art has always been political. Cultural practitioners-artists, curators, academics-have time and again responded to the events around them, not just through artwork but also open letters, discourse, protests, and even their presence or absence at certain shows, thus belying the common perception that art needs to exist simply to adorn a space with its pleasing aesthetics.

Years ago, in shades of grey and black, Somnath Hore etched the suffering of the Bengal famine (1943). In his haunting work, The Despair (1954), Satish Gujral revisited the horrors of Partition. In 2021, when artists, musicians and film-makers were forced to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban took power, women artists questioned extremism and female agency in their work.

The art world stands divided againwith deep fissures apparent as never before-following Israel's attack on Gaza in October. Mumbai-based curator and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote says the Israel-Hamas conflict has caused a great division, largely in the European art world, but with consequences everywhere, including the Global South. "A political critique is being misrepresented as an anti-Semitic attitude," he explains.