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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 27, 2019

When museum money meets shaming

February 27, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss Nan Goldin’s protests at museums that accept charitable contributions from the Sackler family. Here’s an excerpt.

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Nan Goldin, a fine-art photographer hitherto best known for her interest in sexual politics, has found herself a new cause. It is now her mission to force art museums not merely to stop accepting charitable donations from members of the Sackler family, but to give back donations that they’ve already accepted. Having previously staged anti-Sackler protests at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, she has just informed London’s National Portrait Gallery that she won’t permit that museum to mount a planned retrospective of her work if they accept a proposed million-pound donation from the Sacklers….

So who are the Sacklers? Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, two now-deceased brothers who gave millions of dollars to the Met back in the ’70s, are better known nowadays for having launched Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin, the painkilling drug introduced in the U.S. in 1996 whose present-day popularity is widely thought to have driven the opioid-abuse epidemic in America. Ms. Goldin, a recovering OxyContin addict who contends that Purdue Pharma seems to have marketed the drug in such a way as to encourage mass addiction, thinks that any museum that takes or has taken Sackler money should be publicly shamed….

Nowadays social media makes it dangerously easy to convene spur-of-the-moment outrage mobs, and the activists who have come to be known in recent years as “social justice warriors” (or SJWs) are quick to resort to public protest whenever their sensibilities are inflamed, especially by the seeming misconduct of the rich. The problem, however, is that Ms. Goldin is also targeting the family of the late Arthur Sackler, the older brother of Mortimer and Raymond and a major donor to the Met and the Smithsonian Institution, even though he had no connection whatsoever with OxyContin….

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Read the whole thing here.

Snapshot: a 1962 interview with Johnny Mercer

February 27, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Johnny Mercer is interviewed by Ralph Price in 1962 on WSAV-TV of Savannah, Georgia, his home town:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Malcolm Muggeridge on “the personal is political”

February 27, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“I have never been able to relate my feelings about people as individuals to my relations to their public attitudes and behaviour, whether approving or disapproving—something that has often got me into trouble.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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