Documentarian Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour,” “Risk”), in collaboration with her subject Nan Goldin, covers a lot of ground on, among other things, how money affects both the personal and the political, whether you choose to segregate them. or not, in this surprising and moving documentary. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” chronicles Goldin’s artistic life and features substantial and vivid portions of her photography, which she exhibited in 1985 as a slideshow set to music called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which made her famous. Since then, her work has been exhibited in prominent and prestigious museums. She’s done protein work as an AIDS activist in the past, and an overdose of pain medication—not to mention the deaths and addiction spirals of several friends—forces her to investigate a perplexing fact.
That is, many of the prominent and prestigious museums that exhibited Goldin’s work had accepted substantial contributions from the Sackler family. The same Sackler family that made their money by collaborating with Big Pharma (the corporate connections are such that the term has to serve as shorthand here) in creating a global opioid addiction crisis. Among other things, severely underestimating the addictive qualities of his wonder drug OxyContin.
So while Goldin has never hung up her activism badge (her work, intimate and autobiographical as it is, is in many ways a forceful statement about the social marginalization of women and LGBTQ people), she finds herself, with some initial diffidence, removing it. in and organizing protest events in institutions that have somehow supported her life.
It just so happened that he picked an opportune moment to do so. His mini-move coincided with a lot of journalistic curiosity about the Sacklers’ money. Patrick Radden Keefe, who was working on an investigative article on the Sacklers for the New Yorker, sheepishly recalls here that in his initial contact with Goldin, he was slightly dismissive of her and wished her luck with his project. But their combined efforts created an amplification. Subsequent civil court cases have required the Sacklers to pay monumental fines (which, noted with no small irony near the end, have little to no impact on the remaining personal fortunes of family members) and yes, museums are taking away the name of the family. of certain rooms until now dedicated to/by them.
Source: news.google.com