Screenshots Are Forever
A community archive of the art world since October 7, 2023
The Concept
Screenshots Are Forever is an ongoing documentary archive of inflammatory and antisemitic content posted to social media by artists, galleries, curators, critics, publications, and cultural institutions in the aftermath of October 7, 2023.
The project makes no editorial commentary. It does not annotate, rank, or editorialize. It simply collects and preserves what was said publicly — screenshots as primary sources, the way a historian treats a pamphlet or a letter. The archive is the argument.
The Community Dimension
No single person could compile this alone. The archive depends on collective testimony — individuals who saw something, saved something, and chose to submit it. Every contributor is an archivist. Anonymous submissions protect participants while ensuring the record grows.
The breadth of what has been documented reflects not one person's experience but a shared one: the art world — a community built on the language of solidarity and bearing witness — saying things that, by its own stated values, it should not have said. This project makes that visible, permanently.
Appropriation & Precedent
The use of found images as artistic material has a long history. Richard Prince's appropriation of magazine photographs, Sherrie Levine's rephotography, Andy Warhol's silk-screened tabloid images — these works asked questions about authorship, context, and what it means to look. Screenshots Are Forever works in this tradition.
The screenshot — the contemporary document, cropped from a feed designed to disappear — is the raw material of this archive. To collect it is to refuse the logic of the platform: the delete button, the edit, the quiet walk-back. What was said was said.
Why Now
Social media is designed for forgetting. Platforms incentivize rapid production and rapid deletion. Posts that were liked, shared, and amplified one week are silently removed the next — especially when the public or professional cost of their existence becomes apparent.
History moves quickly after a rupture. The archive captures what existed before the revisionism begins. Screenshots don't lie about what was posted. They are time-stamped, context-intact, and immune to the edit history. That is precisely their value.