Where Are You, People? Iran Is Bleeding in the Dark—and the Art World Is Whispering
Selective Conscience: Why Cultural Institutions Won’t Say “Iran”
Silence is not neutral. Silence is a decision—often a curated one.
For days, Iran has been pushed into an information blackout: communications throttled or shut down at a scale that makes documentation dangerous and, in many places, nearly impossible. In that darkness, reports still leak out—fractured, urgent, incomplete, often impossible to verify in real time. That is exactly what a blackout is designed to produce: uncertainty, delay, plausible deniability, and a world that shrugs.
And yet: where are you people?
Where are the museum directors whose institutions can issue statements within hours when the cause is safe, legible, and reputationally convenient? Where are the curators fluent in “bearing witness,” “ethical care,” and “the duty of cultural institutions in times of crisis”? Where are the biennials, fairs, foundations, and academic centers that function—whether they admit it or not—as the art world’s foreign desk?
Where are the organizations that claim to stand for human dignity?
Who is speaking, and why now
I am an Iranian-born American museologist and artist. I lived through the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and three years of the Iran–Iraq War before immigrating to the United States with my family in late 1983. After years of distance from Iranian news, culture, and politics, I made a deliberate decision to return intellectually: my doctoral dissertation examined the foundational history of museums in Iran, c. 1870–1941.
I’m writing as a museum professional who understands institutional language—and institutional evasions. And I’m writing as an Iranian who recognizes, in my bones, what state terror looks like when it decides the world should not see.
The moral trap of “perfect evidence”
During a sustained internet blackout, death tolls and incident reports are inherently difficult to verify. This is not a bug; it is the feature. Blackouts are an enforcement tool: they prevent witnesses from reaching the outside world, and they turn “verification” into a moving goalpost.
Public reporting has offered estimates—sometimes widely divergent—about the number of people killed. Personal communications from inside Iran suggest the scale may be far higher. I cannot independently confirm those private accounts. Neither can most journalists. That is precisely the point.
But we should not pretend “cannot verify” means “nothing is happening.” In authoritarian contexts, it often means the opposite: something is happening that a regime is desperate to erase.
The most shocking part is not the regime’s brutality
The Islamic Republic has a long history of violent repression. The shock—if you work in arts and culture—is how many cultural institutions can metabolize horror everywhere else, yet go metabolically silent when Iran is the subject.
Especially now, when Iranians are pleading for the world to pay attention, and when the blackout itself is a signal flare: We are doing something we do not want you to see.
If you work in the arts, you traffic in symbols. You know silence is a symbol too—and it is read, everywhere, as permission.
The museum world’s selective voice—and a necessary clarification
Let me be extremely clear about something that can get distorted in the speed of outrage:
Two Iranian museum professionals in prominent international roles at ICOM (International Council of Museums) are currently inside Iran. One of them is a Vice President of ICOM International. They—and members of ICOM Iran living in the country—are trapped under the same conditions as everyone else: constricted communications, risk of reprisal, and, under blackout conditions, often no secure way to contact the outside world at all.
The scandal is not that Iranian professionals inside Iran have failed to speak. The scandal is that international bodies and museum leaders outside Iran—who have safety, bandwidth, legal teams, and microphones—continue business as usual while their Iranian colleagues are isolated, endangered, and effectively erased from the conversation.
If ICOM, and the wider museum sector, are truly “international,” then the people who cannot speak freely should be treated as the first constituency to protect—not the easiest to forget.
“It’s complicated” is not an ethics policy
I keep hearing the same rationalizations, dressed up as prudence:
- “We don’t have enough verified information.”
- “We don’t want to inflame tensions.”
- “We can’t take political positions.”
- “We need to remain neutral.”
These are not principles. They are tactics for self-protection.
And the pattern is familiar. The art world can be breathtakingly fast and unified when it comes to statements that cost little—when donors won’t revolt, when social media applause is guaranteed, when the moral landscape is already mapped.
But Iran asks for moral clarity without offering reputational safety. And suddenly “bearing witness” has very limited office hours.
Why the silence? A few uncomfortable incentives
1) Fear as policy: career risk, donor risk, access risk
Institutions fear backlash. Universities fear funding fights. Cultural leaders fear coordinated targeting. In a sector where “community” can mean a small network with outsized influence, fear becomes governance.
If your ethics vanish at the first sign of risk, what you have is branding—not values.
2) Narrative gatekeeping: who gets to define “nuance”
In practice, the art world takes cues from academia, cultural journalism, and professional networks. If those nodes are hesitant—or ideologically policed—institutions follow.
Many Iranians (inside and outside the country) have long argued that parts of Iran-related discourse in the West reward certain narratives and punish others. When that happens, the effect is censorship—often without anyone needing to issue a formal ban.
I spent nearly a decade pursuing a PhD on modern Iranian cultural history (c. 2003–2011). I watched, up close, how institutional prestige can sometimes shield distortions—and how dissenting Iranian voices can be disciplined under the banner of “complexity.” That is why I ask: where are the student and academic protests now? Where is the infrastructure that mobilized so quickly for other causes?
3) Money: soft power and the patronage ecosystem
The global art economy does not float above politics; it is threaded through it. Sponsorships, partnerships, and cultural diplomacy shape what becomes speakable.
If your institution’s survival depends on never offending certain power centers, your “humanitarianism” will always have geographic limits.
4) Geopolitical contamination—and the antisemitism problem
Some suspect Iran is being handled with special caution because expressions of solidarity for Iranian protesters are perceived as aligning with Israel’s stated support for the protest movement.
This is where the art world needs to look hard at itself. Antisemitism is real, and it is not absent from cultural spaces. Sometimes it appears openly; sometimes it hides behind fashionable moral language that treats Jewish fear and grief—or Jewish self-determination—as uniquely illegitimate.
If “Israel supports Iranian protesters” becomes an excuse to abandon Iranian protesters, then the problem is not Iran. The problem is our moral decay.
What would a serious response look like?
Not performative hashtags. Not a panel next spring. Not a single lawyered sentence about “concern.”
A serious response would include:
- Public statements from major museums, associations, fairs, and foundations acknowledging the crisis, the blackout, and credible reports of mass killing—with explicit recognition that verification is constrained by the blackout.
- Institutional amplification of documentation efforts and secure channels for witness testimony.
- Material support for Iranian artists, curators, and scholars at risk: emergency grants, residencies, legal aid, trauma-informed care, and practical relocation assistance where possible.
- Protection for Iranian museum colleagues, including visible commitment to ICOM Iran members and other cultural workers inside Iran who cannot safely speak—plus advocacy for their safety and for restored communications.
- A refusal to launder regime narratives through cultural diplomacy: no prestige invitations, no “neutral” collaborations that normalize a state using blackout conditions to crush dissent.
And yes: it would include the simplest human act—saying out loud that Iranian lives matter even when the internet is off.
“But what if we say the wrong thing?”
Then correct it. Update it. Learn in public.
If you can write wall texts about contested histories, you can write a statement that acknowledges uncertainty while refusing silence.
The greatest wrong thing right now is not imperfect phrasing. It is institutional muteness while people are killed under cover of darkness.
If there was ever a time to listen—seriously listen—to Iranians pleading to be heard, it is now. Ask questions. Make room for perspectives that may unsettle your preferred moral scripts. Do not confuse discomfort with danger.
So again: where are you, people?
Iranians are not asking you for perfect certainty. They are asking for basic solidarity—loud enough to pierce a blackout, steady enough to outlast a news cycle, and serious enough to cost you something.
Because if an art world that claims to be humane cannot respond to mass killing and an information siege, then we should stop calling it activism, stop calling it ethics, and stop calling it humanitarianism.
Call it what it is: a selective conscience.
And then decide whether you still want to live with it.