“In the visual arts, the second coming of MAGA has accelerated the chilling of free speech that followed the Hamas attacks in 2023 and Israel’s genocidal retaliation, as well as the backlash against DEI initiatives in 2024. But whereas institutions and individuals were the culprits before Trump’s reelection, now our local, state, and federal agencies are involved, both indirectly and directly, in shaping how art is made and exhibited to suit Trump’s culturally and socially regressive agenda,” writes Tina Rivers Ryan in the Editor’s Letter that opens Artforum’s December 2025 issue.
 
As Ryan notes, “This isn’t the first time our leaders have adopted the role of cultural censor.” This week, in an effort to more fully understand the current moment, Artforum revisits William Hauptman’s essay on the suppression of art in the McCarthy era, published in the magazine’s October 1973 issue. In the text, Hauptman traces the ways in which “an almost pathological fear of communist infiltration in the first decade after World War II resulted in one of this country’s most shameful endeavors to deny artists their basic freedom of expression.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan