Why Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Is Good for the Art World (But Some Are Still Panicking)

Over the last year, Zohran Mamdani has become a growing force in New York City’s political and cultural ecosystem, uniting people across 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 mayor-elect in a century. His campaign did not trade in metaphor or aspiration. It addressed the conditions under which New Yorkers are trying to live: rent that erases paychecks, inflation that turns groceries into hard decisions, ICE raids in broad daylight and a government shutdown cutting off SNAP benefits for more than 40 million Americans.

Some of Mamdani’s proposals may appear radical if one has never had to choose between rent, food and transportation. There’s free public transit. Rent stabilization that actually stabilizes housing costs. Taxing the wealthy who use New York as a cultural playground maintained by everyone else’s labor. These are not ideological fantasies. They are pragmatic responses to whether a city can support working people, including artists.

It also matters that Mamdani’s relationship to culture is direct, lived and familial. His mother, Mira Nair, has shaped international cinema for more than four decades, building film infrastructure outside Hollywood and mentoring generations of artists. His wife, Rama Duwaji, is a working illustrator navigating delayed invoices, health care precarity, rising rent and freelance instability. Mamdani’s politics do not imagine cultural labor from the outside. They come from inside its economic and emotional reality.

“When I speak about the importance of making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, that is a commitment to artists,” Mamdani said recently. “We cannot have art if we do not have rent that an artist can afford. We cannot have art if we do not have childcare at the fingertips of that same artist. We cannot have art if an artist cannot find $2.90 to get on the bus. Art, at its core, cannot simply be a luxury for the few.”

Many in the art world understood the significance of this. Others reacted with panic. One of the most intensely negative reactions came from the Instagram account @jerrygogosian. In an IG story posted on November 6, the account stated: “Mamdani is bad for the art world. You complain enough when you have to split a painting fifty-fifty with your dealer. Wait until you get those socialist taxes on top of it.”

This was not framed as satire, irony, performance or provocation. It was presented as straightforward truth. And when pushback arrived, instead of stepping back, clarifying or reconsidering, Jerry doubled down. She then posted a video of Richard Spencer—a known neo-Nazi—in her stories in an attempt to defend her position with a “free speech” argument. This was not commentary on fascism. It was the circulation of fascist propaganda in service of a point about taxation. It was a normalization of rhetoric that has historically been used to suppress artists, not safeguard them.

It is also relevant to note that Jerry does not currently live in New York. The critique was not just incorrect—it was geographically and materially removed from the conditions of the city she claimed to be speaking for.

And those conditions are real. I teach in the CUNY system. I work as an art journalist and critic. I navigate austerity, precarity, high rent and shrinking institutional support along with my students, colleagues and peers. The erosion of free expression does not show up as discourse. It shows up as pressure. It shapes how I can discuss war, occupation, protest and state power in a classroom. Over the last year and a half, my reporting on student protests against the war in Gaza and on labor organizing efforts led to my LinkedIn profile being searched by Homeland Security. That is what it looks like when expression is actually under threat.

Which is why it is profoundly disorienting to see “free speech” invoked to defend the comfort of the wealthy while those who actually speak, teach, organize and create inside institutions carry the risk.

The history of contemporary art in New York is inseparable from affordability, adjacency and survival. Abstract Expressionism in cheap industrial lofts. Queer nightlife and performance incubated in bars held together with borrowed money. Street art, punk and independent film emerging in neighborhoods developers did not yet care about. Culture requires time, proximity and the ability to remain in place long enough to build new forms.

When rent rises, when wages stagnate, when transit becomes inaccessible, when cultural labor is treated as an input rather than a livelihood, culture does not collapse. It relocates. It leaves. If taxing billionaires threatens some version of the art world, then the art world in question was never about the art. It was an investment strategy with wall labels. It was donor maintenance marketed as aesthetic judgment.

Mamdani is not a threat to culture or to artists. He is a threat to the idea that the wealthy are culture’s natural custodians and have an ingrained right to artists’ output. The people who make culture have already been subsidizing the city for decades. Now the people who benefit from culture may be asked to contribute. If that feels like collapse, it is only the collapse of a myth. It is not the end of culture. It is the beginning of its repair.