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.
