VIDEO – DOCUMENTARIES RULE –
March 9, 2023 – Between then and now, the museum announced it would no longer accept donations from the Sacklers and excised their name from its galleries. Once the Met’s most cherished VIPs, they would now be persona non grata on the stage that welcomed Goldin. The same goes for the many other venerable cultural institutions, from the Guggenheim to the Tate to the Louvre, that Goldin and her activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) successfully pushed to end their association with the Sacklers, as Poitras’ cameras rolled. Beauty tells the unlikely story of an artist who has always aligned herself with marginalized, stigmatized, and disempowered communities risking her career to ruin the reputation of an obscenely privileged, hugely destructive family that spent billions laundering it. And she triumphs. As the film so elegantly demonstrates, in order to do so, Goldin has had to challenge some of our society’s most pernicious assumptions about what makes a person—or a name—respectable.
