Nan Goldin’s Press Conference

a curly red haired middle aged white lady in a black suit sits, tense, in a black directors chair, as white arms holding recorders and microphones enter the image from the left, and a figure in a black t-shirt with perhaps a keffiyeh around her waiste walks behind in the white floored, black box space of the neue nationalgalerie in berlin. nan goldin's press conference is a 2025 painting by sam mckinniss of a november 2024 opening event of the artist's retrospective where she spoke out against israeli genocide in palestine. this painting was published by equator dot org in december 2025
Sam McKinniss, Nan Goldin’s Press Conference, 2025, published alongside David Velasco’s essay, “How Gaza Broke The Art World,” in Equator

As I read I found myself flagging more and more paragraphs to quote here from David Velasco’s Equator essay, “How Gaza Broke The Art World.” The whole surreally infuriating scene with Klaus at the opening of Nan Goldin’s retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie? The whole Artforum debacle? The fracture of our collective illusions about the art world? Then Sam McKinniss’s Nan Goldin’s Press Conference (2025) scrolled by, and now I can say just go read the whole thing.