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Can Art Clean Up Dirty Money?
Protests at the Guggenheim are changing the landscape of arts patronage
In the Guggenheim, New York, people are throwing down a confetti of paper flyers from the famous curved balconies of the museum. It is Saturday. The museum is crowded because it is six-thirty in the afternoon, when you choose the price of your own admission.
The gallery is brought to a standstill. You pick one up of these paper slips as it lands on the floor and find it’s message is not celebratory one. It’s a fake doctor’s note for the drug OxyContin, a prescription opioid pain reliever.
You wonder what the meaning is. Then people start falling on the ground around you, apparently ill or dying. A sense of crisis fills the gallery.
The event at the Guggenheim was a piece of performance art organised by the photographer Nan Goldin in February of this year. The target of the performance was the Guggenheim’s funding process.
In 2014, Goldin was prescribed the drug OxyContin for painful tendonitis in her left wrist. She soon became addicted, despite taking the pills as prescribed by her doctor. Goldin performed research and began to piece together evidence of OxyContin’s alleged role in the opioid crisis that has been growing to critical levels in the US over the past 20 years…
