The Sackler family wanted their name to be synonymous with art, high-brow prestige and patrician good taste. But despite or because of their vainglorious donations to art galleries and museums all over the world, it became synonymous with something else: pain. And perhaps also with the ugly business of converting agony into money, while leaving behind more poverty and more agony among their abject American customer-base than there was before. Part of the Sackler family were behind the Purdue Pharma corporation marketing the ruinously addictive OxyContin opioid pill, which physicians across the US were persuaded to prescribe for essentially non-serious issues such as sports injuries. And yet only those who have never known what chronic pain is like will dismiss the Sackler addicts as simply greedy or weak.
All this forms the basis of Laura Poitras’s compelling documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about the one person who was to lead the charge against the Sacklers: artist and photographer Nan Goldin. She herself had had work exhibited in venues that had taken the Sackler shilling, so when she became addicted to OxyContin the realisation came with an additional shiver of nausea: unknowingly she had played a part in the artwashing of their fortune. Goldin had already dealt with a lifetime’s worth of agony about the nature of depression and addiction recovery. A vulnerable sister had taken her own life and the title is in fact taken from her own bleak words about the nature of existence.
Poitras shows that all of Goldin’s career had been leading to this moment: an art-protest masterpiece. Goldin set out to take down the Sacklers by embarrassing them in the dead centre of their secular places of worship: the art galleries themselves. She staged spectacular and ingenious uproar in museums, flinging fake prescriptions into antiseptic Sackler gallery spaces and throwing around phoney pill bottles in Sackler museums. (It was a situationist protest tactic pioneered a generation before by art historian Lucy Lippard.)
The film assumes the characteristics of a thriller as the protesters face intimidation and surveillance campaigns – but the Sacklers themselves deny all knowledge.
The power of the film resides in showing how Goldin fought fire with fire. She used art against art. She took the transgressive, confrontational rhetoric of performance art and gave it a live-ammo makeover. Maybe the audiences who witnessed these protests might initially have confused it with an officially licensed event. So there was an extra thrill at realising that no, these people wanted to knock down the smug art-plutocrats and money and lives were at stake.
Goldin achieved near total victory: OxyContin is taboo, almost every museum has removed the Sackler name and the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma have been embarrassed into accepting this without demanding refunds. Yet the film leaves you with the grim realisation that to hundreds of thousands of people, the damage has been done.
