(Ryn Forquer) Issue Study: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an Oscar-nominated documentary that follows American artist and photographer Nan Goldin's life and career, highlighting her fight to have the Sackler family name removed from world-renowned museums. This documentary splices together the story of how Nan Goldin became a well-known and respected photographer in the art world, interviews from friends and colleagues of Goldin, Goldin’s work throughout the decades, and activism done by a group founded by Goldin, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). The documentary mirrors much of Goldin’s work in its structure– the film is broken into seven chapters. Each chapter begins with a slideshow of Goldin’s photography before it transitions into footage and photos from her life or her activist work with P.A.I.N.
Goldin recounts her childhood growing up in a suburb in the 50s and 60s, which she described as “claustrophobic.” She tells about her parents’ attempts to keep up the image of an ideal American family; meanwhile, behind closed doors, their home was full of dysfunction and chaos. Goldin tells us about her older sister, Barbara, who was a rebellious and bold influence in a binal atmosphere.
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| Figure 1. Nan Goldin, Nan and Barbara holding hands. Goldin recalls Barbara confiding in her about her attraction toward other girls, which she was encouraged to suppress and hide. Barbara was institutionalized several times and eventually committed suicide. Goldin recalls overhearing her parents receive the news of her sister’s death, to which her mother responded, “Tell the children it was an accident.” Devastated by her older sister’s passing, Nan ended up in the foster care system; she was kicked out of several homes before ending up in a “hippie free school” Goldin claims couldn’t throw her out. That was where she met her long-term best friend, photographer David Armstrong. She recalls how he dubbed her “Nan,” a nickname she has kept ever since, and how their friendship slowly drew her out of her shell. Nan and David grew up together, encouraging one another’s creativity and self-expression. Eventually, Nan involved herself in the underground art and LGBTQ+ community of 1970s Manhattan, New York. She began photographing marginalized groups– such as people in sex work, drag queens, and gay couples– including herself and her then-girlfriend. |
Though her work was highly unconventional at the time and differed from the then-preferred black-and-white portraiture that populated the world of photography, Goldin’s work eventually ended up in museums and art exhibits.
Four years after her claim to fame, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” she created an exhibit centered around the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, to which Nan lost many of her close friends and colleagues. This exhibit was titled “Witnesses: Against our Vanishing.” Goldin’s friend and colleague David Wojnarowicz wrote for the exhibition, calling New York’s Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor “a fat fucking cannibal in a black skirt.” This controversial statement led to the N.E.A. choosing to pull their funding from Goldin’s show, which she then openly called censorship and an act of “McCarthyism.”
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| Figure 2. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. Installation View, Artists Space, 1989. Frances Miller Smith. |
It should be no surprise that Goldin’s career and life continued to be marked by rebellious acts of protest and breaking the status quo. All of this to say, Goldin’s first days as an activist began long before she campaigned against the Sackler family.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed opens with Goldin’s activist group, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), protesting in 2018 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Temple of Dendur,” an art installation within the museum wing titled “The Sackler Gallery.” Goldin and her fellow activists enter the exhibit and form a human microphone, chanting about the blood on the Sackler family’s hands and tossing replica Oxycontin bottles into the fountain surrounding the exhibition. She and her fellow protestors then briefly stage a “die-in” before being escorted out of the building.
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| Figure 3. Screenshot of P.A.I.N.'s 2018 protest at the MET. Laura Poitras. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022. |
Much like her previous acts of protest, this campaign is close to Goldin’s personal experience and life story. Goldin recounts how she quickly became addicted to Oxycontin after taking it as prescribed for surgery. In her 2017 article announcing her plans to campaign against the Sacklers, she explains, “Though I took it as directed I got addicted overnight [...] The drug, like all drugs, lost its effect, so I picked up the straw [...] When I ran out of money for Oxy I copped dope. I ended up snorting fentanyl and I overdosed.” (1)
What does this have to do with the Sackler family or the art world in general? Goldin explains, “I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed Oxycontin.” (1)
Oxycontin was first released in the late 1990s by the Sackler Family’s pharmaceutical business, Purdue Pharma. Oxycontin was heavily marketed to doctors as a safer alternative to many opioids already on the market. Before Goldin’s protests, the Sackler family was a philanthropic, wealthy family whose names would mostly be recognized as names from the art world– not because they made art, but because they had a long history of owning prestigious art collections and donating large sums of money to art museums across the world. Beyond that, the average person likely couldn’t tell you much about the family’s background or the reasons for their fame and wealth.
Shortly after Nan Goldin went public about her struggle with Oxycontin, writer for The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe, published his article, “The Family that Built an Empire of Pain,” about the Sackler’s dirty claim to fame and the truth behind how they amassed the wealth of artwork they were known for. Press representatives for the widow of Arthur Sackler had responded to news of P.A.I.N.’s protests by saying, “Arthur Sackler died nine years before Oxycontin was introduced and had nothing to do with Purdue Pharma, and his family have not benefited from the Oxycontin profits.” (3)
However, Keefe exposes how questionable pharmaceutical advertising has always marred the Sackler family legacy in his lengthy, scathing article. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Keefe explains more briefly that though Arthur Sackler died before Oxycontin existed, he was certainly no more innocent than his brothers, “[Arthur] had come to this position of prominence and great wealth through the marketing of this drug, which also happened to be quite addictive. He creates a whole means of selling Valium, in which you’re targeting doctors. He devised a compensation scheme in which he would get paid a series of escalating bonuses based on how much Valium they sold. Well, Valium becomes the best-selling drug in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.”
Though many museums were either initially silent or supportive of the Sackler family, the tide began to turn when the National Portrait Gallery refused a donation from the Sackler family. The Tate, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, and many others quickly imitated the National Portrait Gallery’s actions and refused donations from the Sacklers. In July 2019, The Louvre became the first major museum to remove the Sackler name from its buildings. No museums followed at the time.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ends with a virtual hearing in bankruptcy court. Lawyer and member of P.A.I.N., Mike Quinn, argues in this hearing that the victims of Purdue Pharma should have had more say in the punishment the court sought in this case– rather than having a deal made exclusively between the Department of Justice and Purdue Pharma/the Sackler family. One of Purdue Pharma’s lawyers, Marshall Huebner, responded that equating Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family was unfair. On a virtual meeting with Quinn, Goldin asks, “Is there any chance for criminal charges?” Quinn responds, “No.” before briefly explaining the deal between the court and Purdue Pharma. “They just dodged criminal liability,” Quinn concludes. The screen then cuts to a black screen with white text, “To settle the case, the Sacklers agree to pay $6 billion in exchange for unprecedented civil immunity for themselves, their heirs, associates, and private trusts. The cost of the overdose crisis in the U.S. is over $1 trillion.”
The court ordered the Sackler family to witness victim testimonies in a virtual Federal hearing as a requirement of their bankruptcy deal. This is easily the most heart-wrenching scene in the entire film– several victims, including Goldin herself, give their spoken testimony to the Sackler family before the entire court is made to listen to a victim’s 911 call after finding their son dead of an overdose. One witness, a father whose son died of an overdose, addresses the Sacklers directly, “I want to point out to the Sacklers that by the time this two-hour hearing is over, you can add 16 more people to your death list.”
The film closes by noting additional museums that removed the Sackler name from their institution, including the MET, the Guggenheim, the British Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, and many more. Though clearly floored at the outcasting of the Sacklers from the art world, Goldin voices her disappointment in the outcomes of the legal case against the Sacklers, “This is the only place [the Sacklers] are being held accountable.”
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