Art’s darkest patron: Who are the Sackler Family?
It will come as no surprise to anyone that the business side of the art world is just as corrupt as any other industry. Beyond grassroots venues and independent artists, a lot of money is funnelled through the top levels of the sector, with a lot of cash needed to keep the world’s biggest and most renowned galleries open or pay for the upkeep of historic art pieces. But one of the art world’s biggest sponsors has a truly dark backstory.
Around the world, at any number of the leading galleries and museums, there’s a common name plastered on the wall. Or at least, it used to be before the work of activists and artists alike led to institutions severing their ties. But for decades prior, seeing signs that read ‘Sackler’ was a common thing. Whether it be the Sackler wing at the Met Museum in New York City or the Sackler courtyard at London’s V&A, the family’s huge donations to institutions had earned them a lot of plaques.
But the truth behind the Sackler fame is a dark history connected to a drug epidemic that still cripples America especially. To the activists who continue to campaign against the family’s involvement with the art world, the Sacklers use cultural institutions as a desperate attempt to clean up their reputation or siphon their fortune down cleaner roots and away from the murky world in which they earn it. But at the heart of the family’s millions is a pharmaceutical company connected to the opioid epidemic, which claimed 300 victims per day in 2023.
The connection between the creative world and drugs is a whole other issue entirely. The tortured artist myth that haunts music and art alike has always been dangerously associated with addictions, with reckless intoxication being romanticised in the damaging stereotype. But the campaign against the Sackler family sees artists and art world works fighting against that and refusing to let inspiring institutions be linked to a family with a role to play in so many deaths.
It’s a decades-deep history and fight that is only now seeing a major swing of favour against the family as more and more plaques come down. But who are the Sacklers? What did they do? And how did the art world respond?
Who are the Sackler Family?
The Sacklers are an American family with long ties in the medical field. Back in the 1930s, they were a pioneering lot who fought against several terrible medical practices, like abusive lobotomies used on mentally ill patients or the prejudiced segregation of blood banks. Then, in the 1950s, they bought Purdue-Frederick, a pharmaceutical company.
Arthur Sackler, a medical advisor, was also one of the foremost art collectors of his generation. He donated his works to museums and galleries, beginning the family’s connection to the art world.
When Arthur died in 1987, the next generation of the family turned the pharmaceutical company into Purdue Pharma, a company now best known for the introduction of OxyContin – a highly addictive version of oxycodone.
What did the Sackler family do?
Despite OxyContin’s addictive nature, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family heavily promoted the drug. In the 1990s, there was a push towards using opioids for chronic pain management, meaning that pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma began majorly pushing their medications to medical professionals.
As the prescribing of opioids became more accepted and frivolous, the medication began bringing in big bucks for these companies. Purdue Pharma were cashing in on it, hosting promotional conferences across the US to connect with medical professionals and even launching an incentivised bonus system to salespeople to help push OxyContin. By 2017, the medication had increased their earnings to $35billion.
Part of their mission to promote the drug also involved a distinct downplaying of its addictive nature, attempting to convince doctors that their fears for the impact were overblown and that prescribing the pill should be easier and more common. But their fears weren’t exaggerated. Opioids are incredibly, terrifyingly addictive. As more patients were prescribed the pills for common injuries or pain management after routine surgeries, a huge wave of impact hit America hard. It was quickly the country’s biggest drug problem. By 2015, opioids caused over 50,000 deaths annually in the country, more than car accidents or guns. By 2016, more than 11million Americans misused prescription opioids, and half of all overdoses related to the drug began with a routine prescription. In 2023, the number of deaths had increased to over 80,000 annually.
In an investigative piece by The New Yorker, they declared that the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma played a “special role” in the opioid crisis as the company “was the first to set out, in the 1990s, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown.”
In 2019, a lawsuit was filed against the family that included 1,600 cases from more than 500 counties in America, all calling for the Sacklers to take responsibility and be punished for the intense and horrifying consequences of OxyContin. As Jim Cooper, a congressman from Tennessee, watched David Sackler testify at the US House of Representatives for a hearing on the role of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family in the opioid epidemic, he said, “I am not sure I am aware of any family in America that’s more evil than yours.”
How did the art world respond to the Sackler family?
Since Arthur Sackler started establishing relationships with galleries and museums, the family has continued to be major donors to several institutions. Over the years, they’ve given millions to leading galleries like the Tate, V&A, National Portrait Gallery, and many more worldwide.
However, as the epidemic ripped on, artists and activists began taking a stand. One of the leading names in the fight against the Sackler name is Nan Goldin, an iconic American photographer. As her earliest work dealt with the AIDs crisis, and then as Goldin herself fell into opioid addiction, her activism against the family and the epidemic they contributed to makes a lot of sense. Along with some other recovered addicts and activists, she founded the campaign ‘Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.)’. Goldin, especially, is in a powerful position to get galleries to turn their backs on the Sacklers. In 2019, the National Portrait Gallery was one of the first to do so after Goldin threatened to withdraw all her work from their retrospective exhibition of her career if they didn’t turn down a £1million gift from the family.
Goldin and her group have staged protests worldwide, using their influence as artists to encourage more institutions to split from the family by reminding them that it’s the artists they serve, not pharmaceutical families. By now, a long list of major galleries have taken down their Sackler signs, with the Tate recently joining the ranks.
In terms of consequences for the family, Purdue Pharma was dissolved on September 1st, 2021, following the federal hearing. The Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5billion over nine years, most of which is going to fund addiction treatment.
