By Eleanor Ringel Cater
If you were in college in the Northeast during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, you probably put in your time at protest marches. At Brown, we theater majors supported the marchers with so-called living tableaux along their route.
My contribution was as the kneeling girl in the infamous Kent State photo (she’s kneeling by the body of one of the dead students; what we had in common was long hippie hair).
My point is, I understand the passion of protest; I also get how silly it can seem.
So, when the Oscar-nominated documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” shows artist Nan Goldin and her cohorts chanting, “Sackler lied/Thousands died,” followed by an en-masse die-in, I thought, Geez, grow up. But I also thought, yeah, keep sticking it to the Sacklers.
Ah, the Sacklers. The pharma zillionaires who’ve earned a fortune off the opioid crisis. And who’ve used a large part of that fortune to fund exhibitions at some of the most famous museums in the world. Like, say, the Sackler wing housing the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dubbed “the queen of hardcore photography” by one writer, Goldin made her reputation chronicling the Downtown Scene in Boston and New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Her snapshots of a particularly American demimonde had a Warhol-ish immediacy without a Warhol-ish irony (or intelligence).
As a biographical portrait of Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” gets the job done. Even if you’ve never heard of her (I’m raising my art-deprived hand), the film efficiently places her work within a certain context.
However, the movie has been misleadingly marketed. Yes, Goldin’s campaign against the Sacklers is a focus. But the film as a whole is more a portrait of the artist as a young, then middle-aged, then older woman. And if Goldin (or her work) doesn’t appeal to you, well, a good deal of this movie won’t either.
Then again, if her style of activist/artist hits a sweet spot, then “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” may strike you as both eye opening and admirably outraged. Bottom line on this one: up to you.
