Goldin

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeIt’s hard to quite comprehend the scale of the North American opioid crisis. The rise of the hyper-addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin – a “blockbuster drug”, in putrid Big Pharma parlance – has led to more than 600,000 deaths in the US and Canada since 1999. Experts have predicted that as many as 1.2 million more people may die from opioid overdoses by the end of the decade.…

The part of the Sackler family behind the company Purdue Pharma have become notorious for their addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin which blighted innumerable American lives, while the Sacklers culturewashed the resulting colossal profits with conceited museum donations. There was hardly a museum in any first world capital city that didn’t salute their narcissism with a “Sackler wing” or a “Sackler courtyard”. Their story was first substantially told by the New Yorker’s investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in…

In September 2016, I met with Nan Goldin in C Wing of Reading Gaol. She was there alongside several other artists at the invitation of Artangel, the London-based organisation that specialises in often ambitious site-specific installations. The ensuing group exhibition paid homage to Oscar Wilde, the prison’s most famous inmate, whose writings Goldin first encountered as a teenager. The message she took from his life and work, she told me, “is that you can remake yourself completely.”Since then, that is in effect what she…