British artist Tai Shani has announced that she will cancel a forthcoming book deal with the publisher Phaidon due to its owner, Leon Black’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein.
Black, a private equity billionaire and current trustee of MoMA, purchased Phaidon in 2012. In 2019 his links to Epstein first came under scrutiny when it was discovered that he had paid the convicted child sex offender $158 million for ‘financial advice’. In the recently released files, Black’s full name appears more than 8,200 times and some of which contain ‘numerous horrific allegations against Leon Black’, Shani said in an Instagram post.
‘Behind these allegations, whose specifics many of us have read with horror, behind the geopolitical implications, the many unsurprising ties to the art world, behind the gossip, behind the observations about global networks of power, behind the spectacle of violence are human beings, victims: young women, children, often from precarious backgrounds, real lives exploited and destroyed. Even in this age of increasing impunity and breathtaking ruthlessness, their suffering, their lives matter and must be acknowledged,’ Shani writes.
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