Nan Goldin inspires audiences to consider decency in new documentary about the photographer

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Nan Goldin inspires audiences to consider decency in new documentary about the photographer
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Director Laura Poitras' 'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” examines Nan Goldin's art and activism, and is very much a picture preoccupied with what those in power would rather sweep under the rug.

Nan Goldin was 11 years old when her older sister Barbara died by suicide. Her parents told everybody it was an accident. Mental health issues were not considered proper conversation in 1965 suburbia, where rigid repression doubled as decency, even when it was driving people mad.

It is also a work of activism, focusing on Goldin’s efforts to remove the Sackler family name from art galleries in museums around the world. The barons of bankrupt Perdue Pharma were long known for their philanthropy, with the late patriarch Arthur M. Sackler endowing countless exhibitions and curating one of the largest personal collections in the world with the fortune he made marketing Valium.

“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” runs on parallel tracks, alternating between an artist’s biography and the contemporary battles of an organization Goldin founded called, staging street theater protests to embarrass arts organizations into refusing further donations from the family and banning the name from their buildings.

If the disruptions and die-ins sound slightly familiar, it’s because P.A.I.N. is using a lot of the same strategies and tactics employed by AIDS awareness organizations in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Goldin was at the forefront then as well, curating the controversial 1989 “” installations for which the National Endowment for the Arts notoriously revoked its grant due to uncouth comments about Cardinal O’Connor and Senator Jesse Helms in the program guide penned by artist David Wojarnowicz.

From a narrative standpoint, I suppose I can see why some have questioned the movie’s split focus between Goldin’s personal history and the contemporary Sackler stuff. But to me it feels all of a piece, restlessly questioning entrenched ideas of what constitutes decency and respectability in America. After the deaths of half a million people, one of the world's wealthiest families at the center of the crisis can somehow purchase unprecedented immunity with a $6 billion settlement.

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