Nan Goldin
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK
Nan Goldin passed me by. By the time I became involved in the art world in the mid-1990s her reputation seemed unassailable, at least as far as New Yorkers were concerned. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-96) had by then been embraced as a panacea for all the excesses of irony and materialism of the 1980s. Critics were clamouring for a return to ‘the real’, and gallerists and collectors thought they’d found their authentic selves reflected in these romantic images of the denizens of Manhattan’s demi-monde, or fell for the fantasy of slumming it with what seemed like a reprise of Andy Warhol’s flawed Factory beauties. ‘By the time of the 1993 Whitney Biennial’, wrote Lisa Liebmann and Brooks Adams in the catalogue to













