Is it time to purge the name Sackler from the arts?
Claire Allfree meets Patrick Radden Keefe, whose book about the disgraced family has just won Britain’s top non-fiction prize
In 2017, Yale University changed the name of Calhoun College, one of its 12 student residential colleges, to that of Grace Murray Hooper. Hooper was a pioneering computer scientist and one of Yale’s most distinguished graduates; John Calhoun, a former US vice president, was a white supremacist and supporter of slavery. Go figure. Yet Patrick Radden Keefe, a Yale alumnus and now a staff writer for The New Yorker, had reservations. “At the same time, there were these institutions at Yale named after the Sackler family,” he says. “There was all this conversation happening about Calhoun and slavery, but no one was talking about this thing happening right now, today.”
By “this thing”, Keefe meant America’s opioid crisis, in which more than half a million people have died from prescription drug-related overdoses since 1999 and which has been overwhelmingly precipitated by the former US pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma’s deliberate mis-marketing of its highly addictive painkiller Oxycontin. Last week, Keefe won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Empire of Pain, his impeccably researched investigation into the links between the now bankrupted Purdue Pharma, facing lawsuits worth up to a reported $8.3billion (£6.2billion), and its owners, the Sacklers – Richard Sackler, son of Raymond, who bought Purdue with his brothers Mortimer and Arthur in 1952, was co-chairman of the company between 2003 and 2015, and was an active board member until two years ago. Much has now been written about Purdue, which pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2019, but the Sacklers, whom Forbes now estimate to be worth about
$10 billion, with much of that coming from $35 billion in Oxycontin sales, have largely remained shadows in the wings. “Their name is still carved into the walls of American institutions – the Met; the Guggenheim; the Smithsonian,” he says. “Yet it has never appeared on the Purdue website.”
Keefe, 44, who lives in New York and is married with two sons, didn’t speak to any Sackler members during the research for Empire of Pain – “in public they have always maintained a frosty indifference” – but they did, however, speak to him in the form of numerous letters sent to The New Yorker and to his US publisher Doubleday threatening legal action. At one point, Purdue even sent a private investigator after him. Yet Keefe refused to be deterred. “I studied law at Yale. And the truth is, when you look closely at a lot of these legal threats, they are empty. They don’t have a case. The truth is a very strong defence.”
Beyond the tragedy of countless lives destroyed are wider questions about the links between private money and public institutions. The Sackler family stopped giving money to UK institutions in 2019, but the Tate and many other British galleries and museums have all been beneficiaries. And while the Serpentine removed the Sackler name from one of its galleries earlier this year, others, points out Keefe, haven’t been so forthright: the V&A has the Sackler Centre for arts education and the Sackler Courtyard; the British Museum has a room for private hire named after Raymond and Beverly Sackler; while the National Gallery has no plans to change a room named after the Sacklers within its galleries.
Keefe understands the tricky position arts institutions are in, relying on an increasingly precarious combination of public money and private donations in this country and almost entirely reliant on philanthropy in the US.
“I accept that if institutions introduce litmus tests for morality when it comes to money, they would have no money. Of course, it’s an easier question to answer in science. It’s not hard to find people in medical research, for instance [the Sacklers also donate heavily to scientific organisations] arguing that a dollar is a dollar. They would say ‘I don’t care where the money comes from; I’m saving lives here.’ The arts can’t claim the same argument. But if you have the Sackler name carved into your wall, you might as well have the word Oxycontin carved there. It’s the same difference.”
Yet an acknowledgment of this has been slow in coming. It was photographer Nan Goldin who helped change public opinion, having become addicted to Oxycontin after taking the pills exactly as prescribed for a painful wrist. She staged protests at institutions around the world with links to the Sacklers, including London’s V&A in 2019.
“Her work is in some of those museums,” says Keefe. “Some of the organisations she is protesting against are trying to get her to do shows with them.” In 2019 the National Portrait Gallery refused a £1 million donation from the Sacklers after Goldin refused to allow them to stage a retrospective of her work. “I don’t think you would have seen change if she hadn’t protested.”
So where does all this leave the relationship between arts institutions and philanthropy? Part of the difficulty is that philanthropy has become increasingly public, with donors demanding their generosity be honoured with immortality: most public arts centres in London now have wings, rooms, even seats in theatres named after those who have given them cash. Keefe doesn’t think it’s up to him to tell institutions what to do. But he is clear in his own mind. “There is still altruism in anonymous philanthropy. But there is no pure altruism that involves naming rights.” As a lawyer of Arthur Sackler once told him, “If you put your name on it, that’s not charity, that’s a business deal.”
‘If you have “Sackler” carved into your wall, you might as well have “Oxycontin” ’