In April 2025, the French newspaper Libération released a three-part investigation that should have detonated like a bomb across the contemporary art world. Instead, it landed in a familiar quiet—a soft, cultured silence, as if a curator had drawn a velvet curtain over the scene. “The Horrible Art World’s Cult of Silence That Protected Claude Lévêque” is an op-ed written by a seasoned art world insider.
The investigation, brilliantly reported by Claire Moulène and Willy Le Devin in Libération, lays bare not only the decades-long pattern of child sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by artist Claude Lévêque (72) but also the complicity of an entire ecosystem that fed him with money, prestige, and institutional protection. This is not a story of one man’s fall—it is the unveiling of a system. Perhaps a more fitting title for this piece would have been: The Artist, the Boys, and the Rooms We Didn’t Want to Look Into.
Claude Lévêque was no marginal provocateur. He was a mainstay of the European art scene—a conjurer of light, atmosphere, and seduction. His immersive installations, often aglow in neon, became shorthand for a particular kind of cultural sophistication. Often institutions paid for them no less than six figures. Lévêque’s name adorned biennale catalogues and the walls of prestigious institutions. Soleil Noir, one of his most emblematic works, now decorates a salon in the Élysée Palace and features in official photographs alongside President Emmanuel Macron.
And yet, as the investigation makes clear, the same hands that shaped those luminous visions also authored letters laced with abuse—and molested boys, some as young as ten. These children were not merely present; at times, they were embedded in the work itself. In some cases, the boys where present during exhibition openings, under the gaze of influential curators, leading critics, and well-known politicians.
Lévêque’s artistic practice and his alleged crimes are not separate narratives; they are interwoven threads of a single tapestry. Multiple victims recall being drawn into his circle under the guise of artistic collaboration—as models for his work or “assistants’ who travelled with him across France and Switzerland, preparing meals for adults during art world excursions, and sharing hotel rooms paid for by cultural institutions. One victim recalls: ‘I cooked for everyone.’ He remembers exactly who was there. The question is—why don’t they remember him? Or worse—why won’t they speak The art world’s own omertà.
‘At night, while you sleep, I destroy the world,’ Claude Lévêque wrote to the most recent boy we now know as a victim. A neon work bearing this phrase—written in the boy’s own hand—resides in the Collection Frac Auvergne. Art world theorists once spilled endless, hollow words glorifying the significance of the piece. I wonder what those curators think of it now. In truth, I already know their excuses; I’ve had to endure them for years. And now, they’ve revealed exactly how monstrous they are.
In the ’80s, people knew about his preferences. In 1997, Lévêque’s assistant was thirteen. Lévêque was forty-four. Between 2003 and 2006, the cycle continued—cities, fairs, installations, and boys who moved silently through the circuits of prestige and production. There were rumours in Venice. Whispers in Paris. But like artefacts buried in an inconvenient garden, they were left untouched.
The horror lies not only in the allegation that Lévêque abused children, but in the fact that he did so at the very heart of one of the most elite, hyper-connected, and self-congratulatory cultural networks in the world. Venice Biennale. Lyon Biennale. Paris. Vienna. Basel. The shows glittered. The invitations flowed. And the boy in the room? He remained invisible—until now.
This is not a case of collective ignorance. It is a case of collective refusal. The art world—galleries, institutions, curators, collectors—shielded itself with plausible deniability and polished moral discourse, all while turning its back on something that everyone seemed to have known for forty years. Everyone. I never met the man. I never curated his work. I was never in the same room with him. But I heard the rumours. And always, the whisper ended with: ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
Omertà.
Art, they told us, is about truth. About seeing the world differently. But time and again, this same world prioritises money, myth, and the polished brand over the uncomfortable—yet necessary—confrontation with harm. Even now, some argue for a separation between the man and the work. But the work was instrumental to the abuse. The very brilliance we once hung on white walls was constructed from fear, grooming, and silence.
The sound in one of the installations is the breath of a young teenager. A breath struggling for air, conveying a sense of anguish and strangled alienation.
We do not get to hang his neons and pretend they exist in a vacuum. Many of those luminous words—those erratic, stylised fragments of innocence—were sourced from his victims. The “handwriting of children,” one of his most celebrated aesthetic signatures, was quite literally that. The boys were there: writing, drawing, performing. Co-authors of a myth that erased them.
In one of many grotesque ironies, a former assistant—himself a victim—went on to be a revelation at the Emerige Prize in 2017. His brother remained in Lévêque’s orbit for over a decade, through the Venice Biennale, and was even hired by the Kamel Mennour Gallery, which represented Lévêque at the time—and has since dropped him. Twelve years of proximity, during which the entire ecosystem seemed to hum with admiration.
There is a chilling moment recounted in Libération’s dossier and the judge’s file. During the Dutroux affair in the 1990s, Claude Lévêque confided to a peer that he had hidden compromising materials—photos, letters—in a suitcase, which he handed to a friend in the art world for safekeeping. That person, named and contacted by the newspaper, remains silent to this day. They are still active in the art world. Even now, the art world protects him—or perhaps, protects their investment.
This is not about removing artworks from walls. It is about reframing them—with context, accountability, and a reckoning long overdue.
If Claude Lévêque’s work is to be exhibited again, let it be as documentary—as evidence of the inner workings of our art world. Let the names of those boys appear beside the titles as co-authors. Let the rooms they slept in, the drawings they made, be seen not as concept, but as testimony.
Why not exhibit his work? The art is both astonishing and horrifying—much like a documentary about Jeffrey Dahmer. The installations should be curated with this story in mind. All the prominent curators, directors of institutions, and politicians who once praised him should be featured on the wall and interviewed about the significance of their own work.
Will any institution allow such an exhibition? I am willing to curate it.
Lévêque was hailed as a political artist, a cultural commissioner—shielded by the very people who lecture us on the radical power of art. And the silence extended beyond institutions—it seeped into our classrooms, our panels, our magazines.Try to speak critically about these ‘living monuments,’ and you are met with ridicule or marginalisation, especially if you are young, or black, or queer, or unwilling to play by the old rules.
The warlords of the art world have long preferred their own echo.
And so, here we are. With evidence. With names. With neon poems written by children. Six-figure sums of public money were spent each time he was commissioned—on horror, wrapped in spectacle.
We are here, staring at an industry—do not deceive yourself, it is nothing more than an industry, focused solely on profit—that continues to function beautifully—unless you’re a boy, alone in a hotel room, waiting for someone to see you.
The neoliberal capitalist institutionalisation of art has led to its domestication, rendering it incapable of calling forth anything truly new. Worse still, the discourse of the so-called theorists of art—those we once applauded—has become a disembodied world of disinformation, secrecy, and the abstraction of truth.
I will paraphrase Ash Sarkar, the brilliant British journalist from The Guardian and Novara Media, in the Media Confidential podcast: “It’s bullshit artists inflating the stock of other bullshit artists.” I will add: curators, art institutions directors, and politicians.
This is not just about Claude Lévêque. It is about all the rooms we didn’t want to look into. All the voices we ignored.
And the price of silence, which we were far too willing to pay.
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