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We Just Can’t Quit Cancel Culture
Our society will keep feeling the need to cancel people until we take this next step.
I recently went to see Laura Poitras’s harrowing new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and found myself at first confused by it. Nan Goldin is certainly a force of nature, and her photography and activism have had a clear and important impact on our culture, but… this is Laura Poitras we’re talking about. She makes documentaries about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and NSA surveillance. Edward Snowden leaked his files to her directly. Nan Goldin’s story, while certainly moving and worthy of a documentary, just didn’t seem that… Laura Poitras-y to me.
By the end of the film, the subject matter began to fit my view of Poitras a bit better. Nan Goldin’s story does have deep political significance: Goldin is perhaps the only person who found a way to impose real consequences on the Sackler family for their role in the opioid crisis.
After years of Goldin’s activism against the Sacklers, museums across the globe finally stopped accepting Sackler donations and removed the Sackler name from their wings. Goldin targeted the Sacklers through the art world deliberately. After Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy without leaving a dent in the Sackler family’s wealth, legal options for holding the…
