And there was always the chance that she might be shaking hands with royalty – or at least philanthropic royalty, in the shape of the British branch of the Sackler family, who are believed to have given more than £2 million to the development. The Duchess made her way around with her customary poise, accepting a bouquet from a young well-wisher before arriving at the Sackler Courtyard. Paved with 11,000 handmade porcelain tiles in 15 different patterns, the courtyard is the most striking feature of the new quarter. Indeed, as the Duchess entered it, she mouthed the word ‘wow’. Just as strikingly, the Sackler family name is etched tastefully on to the courtyard in a large, elegant font, and their generosity is further acknowledged with a mirrored plaque name-checking the late family patriarch, the Anglophile Mortimer Sackler, his third wife, the British-born Dame Theresa Sackler, and all seven of Mortimer’s children, three of them by Dame Theresa.
The Sacklers had triumphed once again – as they had done at the Tate, the National Gallery, the Serpentine, Kew Gardens, the Museum of London, the Ashmolean and other institutions, all of which have named galleries, wings, escalators, scientific bodies, bridges and rooms after them. And that’s just in the UK; the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York both have their own Sackler Wings, and Berlin’s Jewish Museum has a Sackler Staircase.
Unfortunately for the Sacklers, one of these millions had been pledged to the National Portrait Gallery, where a retrospective of the American photographer Nan Goldin’s work is planned. Unfortunately, because Goldin has declared that, ‘I will not do the show… I have told them I would not do it if they take the Sackler money.’ Goldin herself became addicted to OxyContin in 2014 after being prescribed it for tendonitis in her left wrist. She soon increased her intake, seeking out sources on the black market; eventually she moved on to other drugs, overdosing on Fentanyl, another dangerous opioid. Last year, she wrote an account of her addiction in Artforum: ‘When I got out of treatment, I became absorbed in reports of addicts dropping dead from my drug OxyContin. I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic… I decided to make the private public by calling them to task.’ Goldin’s campaign recently caused a sensation at the New York Guggenheim (a key recipient of Sackler money) when she and fellow campaigners occupied the museum and dropped a maelstrom of mock prescriptions and pill bottles into Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark atrium.
