Over the past year, Zohran Mamdani has become a growing force in New York City’s political and cultural ecosystem, uniting people from business sectors, boroughs, neighborhoods and artistic circles. On Tuesday, November 4, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, made history: the first Muslim mayor of New York City and the youngest elected mayor in a century. His campaign did not traffic in metaphor or ambition. It addressed the conditions under which New Yorkers are trying to live: rents that erase paychecks, inflation that turns groceries into difficult decisions, ICE raids in broad daylight, and a government shutdown that cuts off SNAP benefits to more than 40 million Americans.
Some of Mamdani’s proposals may seem radical if you never have to choose between rent, food and transportation. There is free public transport. Rent stabilization that actually stabilizes housing costs. Taxing the wealthy who use New York as a cultural playground maintained by the labor of everyone. These are not ideological fantasies. They are pragmatic answers to the question of whether a city can support working people, including artists.
It is also important that Mamdani’s relationship to culture is direct, lived and familial. His mother, Mira Nairhas shaped international cinema for more than forty years, building film infrastructure outside Hollywood and mentoring generations of artists. His wife, Rama Duwajiis a working illustrator dealing with deferred bills, uncertain health care, rising rents, and freelance instability. Mamdani’s politics does not imagine cultural labor from outside. They come from the economic and emotional realities of the country.
“When I talk about the importance of making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, it is a commitment to artists,” Mamdani said recently. “We can’t have art if we don’t have rent that an artist can afford. We can’t have art if we don’t have childcare within easy reach of that same artist. We can’t have art if an artist can’t find $2.90 to get on the bus. Art, at its core, can’t just be a luxury for the few.”
Many in the art world understood the significance of this. Others reacted in panic. One of the most intensely negative reactions came from the Instagram account @jerrygogosian. In an IG story posted on November 6, the report said: “Mamdani is bad for the art world. You complain enough when you have to split a painting ‘fifty-fifty’ with your dealer. Just wait until you get those socialist taxes on top.”
This was not framed as satire, irony, performance or provocation. It was presented as a simple truth. And when pushback came, instead of stepping back, clarifying, or reconsidering, Jerry doubled down. She then posted a video of Richard Spencer – a known neo-Nazi – to her stories, attempting to defend her position with a “free speech” argument. This was not a commentary on fascism. It was the spread of fascist propaganda in service of a point about taxation. It was a normalization of the rhetoric that has traditionally been used to oppress and not protect artists.
It is also pertinent to note that Jerry does not currently live in New York. The criticism was not only incorrect, but geographically and materially disconnected from the circumstances of the city for which she claimed to speak.
And those circumstances are real. I teach in the CUNY system. I work as an arts journalist and critic. Together with my students, colleagues and colleagues, I have to deal with budget cuts, uncertainty, high rents and declining institutional support. The erosion of free speech is not reflected in the discourse. It manifests as pressure. It determines how I can discuss war, occupation, protest and state power in a classroom. Over the past year and a half, my reporting on student protests against the war in Gaza and labor organizing efforts has led to my LinkedIn profile being searched by Homeland Security. That This is what it looks like when expression is actually threatened.
Therefore, it is extremely disorienting to see “free speech” invoked to defend the comfort of the wealthy, while those who actually speak, teach, organize and create within institutions bear the risk.
The history of contemporary art in New York is inextricably linked to affordability, proximity and survival. Abstract expressionism in cheap industrial lofts. A strange nightlife and performances in bars, kept together with borrowed money. Street art, punk and independent film are emerging in neighborhoods that developers weren’t yet concerned with. Culture requires time, proximity, and the ability to stay on site long enough to build new forms.
When rents rise, when wages stagnate, when transit becomes inaccessible, when cultural labor is treated as an input rather than a livelihood, culture does not collapse. It’s moving. It leaves. If taxing billionaires threatens a certain version of the art world, then the art world in question was never about art. It was a wall-label investment strategy. It was donor maintenance marketed as an aesthetic judgment.
Mamdani is not a threat to culture or artists. He threatens the idea that the wealthy are the natural custodians of culture and have a deep-seated right to the production of artists. The people who create culture have been subsidizing the city for decades. Now the people who benefit from culture can be asked to contribute. If that feels like a collapse, it’s just the collapse of a myth. It’s not the end of culture. It’s the beginning of its repair.
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