Nan Goldin has been named number one in the Art Review Power 100 - quite right too
Nan Goldin was working as a go-go dancer in New York in the late Seventies when she realised – thanks to the proprietor of Tin Pan Alley bar, Maggie Smith, who pointed it out – that she was a political artist.
Her most famous bodies of work date from that period; unflinching but loving chronicles of the lives of Boston drag queens and New York’s post-Stonewall queer scene, of drug use and violence in the city’s subcultural underbelly, that explore universal themes of love and sex, domesticity and dependency, pain and performance through the friends in her circle, so often considered outsiders by wider society.
In more recent years, she’s risen to family, then principal owners of Purdue Pharma, the company behind the highly addictive drug , blamed for America’s ongoing opioid crisis. As a direct result of her activities over the last six years, institutions around the world – including Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Serpentine and more here in the UK – have handed back or refused Sackler money, and .
