ABSTRACT
In 1986, Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency was first published, making available Goldin’s personal photographic diary of herself and her friends exorbitantly exposed to sex, drugs, and violence. Goldin’s work has been distinctive for its intimate and sympathetic portrayals of the “underbelly” of straight society. In Goldin’s “world,” the privileged status of the first term of the dominant oppositional pairings—male/female, health/illness, white/black, straight/gay, inside/outside—has been overturned and her self-styled “family” of “inverts” reign supreme. The Goldin retrospective typified this return to primitivist fantasies of the anthropologist remade as an artistic interpreter of culture. Foster argues that the fashion of the artist as ethnographer follows the lure of anthropology and its privileged tropes of alterity, cultural contexutality, interdisciplinarity, and self-reflexivity. The film High Art opens in the aptly named offices of Frame magazine, a fictional art photography monthly that would seem to be modeled after the glossy format of Aperture.
