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I Flew Across the Country to Look at the Most Controversial Work of Art in Canada

Why did the Art Gallery of Ontario change its mind on acquiring Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome?

I Flew Across the Country to Look at the Most Controversial Work of Art in Canada

Why did the Art Gallery of Ontario change its mind on acquiring Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome?

Published 6:30, MARCH 24, 2026

Last month, I flew to Vancouver to see what may be the most controversial piece of art in Canada: Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome, a twenty-six-minute slideshow that has already provoked a storm of institutional anxiety and donor backlash.

The new piece owes its title to the rare psychosomatic condition named after the French nineteenth-century writer Stendhal, who found himself “in a sort of ecstasy” after visiting Florence. Confronted with overwhelming beauty, the body may react with dizziness, hallucinations, and even heart palpitations.

Goldin’s slideshow splices together photographs she’s taken throughout her more than fifty-year career—of friends, lovers, narcissists—with the Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces that have moved her over two decades of museum visits. She titles one of the final slides “Sites of my Stendhal Syndrome”: places where she has found herself “aesthetically and ecstatically” transformed—and which she, in turn, has sought to transform. It is in many ways a love letter to museums.

All of which makes the fate of the work in Toronto more confounding. The Art Gallery of Ontario, which owns three of Goldin’s works, had planned to acquire the piece jointly with the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. But the decision was, per the Globe and Mail, struck down in a close vote by a volunteer committee, after AGO trustee and major donor Judy Schulich urged committee members to vote against the acquisition, which they did. Goldin—who had been outspoken about the ongoing genocide in Gaza—was declared “antisemitic” by Schulich; another committee member compared Goldin to Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Goldin is herself Jewish. In the immediate fallout, curator John Zeppetelli resigned, along with three members of the acquisition committee. Chief curator Julian Cox has since stepped down. The AGO is hardly new to controversy: in November 2023, curator of Indigenous art Wanda Nanibush was reportedly pushed out after posting pro-Palestine messages on social media.

“Personal political views were brought into the conversation,” the AGO wrote in an email to me about the failed acquisition. “This is not intended to be part of the process.” With Toronto off the itinerary, the exhibition opened in Vancouver. Something of an omertà exists around the AGO’s decision—neither the Walker nor the VAG will comment on it. Their refusal makes me nervous.

In Vancouver, I spend most of my time with my boyfriend’s welcoming and WASPy aunts, Joni and Tracey. We visit the museum five days in a row, a sort of ritual around which we plan our week. I try in vain to explain to them my nervousness to write about it, which is not just because of the career implications—“My market tanked from one day to the next because of my support of Palestine,” Goldin herself said in a 2025 interview with Dazed—but for affinities far more personal, and even to tell Joni and Tracey that I’m nervous feels like a sort of betrayal. There were no Jewish day schools or Zionist summer camps where they grew up, and I often correct that we went to synagogue on Saturday, not Sunday, and yes it was every week, and yes we kept Kosher, and no I don’t anymore, and yes I feel guilty about it. There is an affinity that stays inevitably lost in translation. When the anonymous committee member likened Goldin to Reifenstahl, it was as though she was calling her a Judenrat, a self-hating Jew, the Holocaust term for Jews who turn on other Jews.

For all this, Stendhal Syndrome has nothing to do with Palestine, or ceasefires, or Israel. But like all of Goldin’s work, it is political in her defiance of who is worthy of inclusion in the canon. Goldin grew up in a middle-class suburb outside of Boston. When she was eleven, her older sister Barbara, who had been in and out of psychiatric institutions, killed herself. Goldin has since eulogized Barbara in her film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–22). A psychiatrist warned her parents that if they kept their youngest daughter in the family home, a similar fate would befall her, and so Goldin spent her teen years in the Jewish foster care system, eventually finding refuge in Boston’s underground scene.

She got her start photographing her friends at a local drag bar: “I met a group of queens, and I wanted to put them on the cover of Vogue,” she said in an interview with PBS. “And the idea of putting them on the cover of Vogue was so far from a possibility in 1972.” She took snapshots of friends and partiers of all genders and orientations at odd hours of the night (it’s rare to find natural light in those early photographs), caught in intimate moments of repose.

In the late ’70s, she moved to New York and joined the post-punk scene, befriending the likes of director John Waters and actress Cookie Mueller. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), perhaps her most iconic slideshow, contains nearly 700 photographs documenting heroin-laced, queer, avant-garde subcultures, finding her subjects, herself included, strewn on beds in various states of love and lust, heartbreak and disappointment. She turns the camera on herself too: “Nan one month after being battered, 1984” is the title of the slideshow’s centrepiece, a disturbing self-portrait in which her bruised cheekbone and bloodshot eye are a fluorescent red as startling as her lipstick and curly mane.

Goldin has remained committed to remembering the loves of her life that official narratives might otherwise omit. In the late ’80s, as her friends were dying en masse, she started photographing them in final moments of joy. This archival urge persists throughout her oeuvre. Her 2019–2021 show, Memory Lost, is an impressionistic take on the throes of addiction, in which she unearths forgotten slides from “a time when the walls are closing in and memory is blacked out.” In her book The Other Side, she compiles twenty years of photographs of trans friends and lovers.

Goldin has built her career on the fringes of the mainstream, in shadowy nightclubs and artist lofts with people bound for disappearance, running away from repressive suburbia, and yet she’s been embraced by establishment institutions all the same. She has had retrospectives at the Whitney, the Grand Palais, and the Centre Pompidou; her work has been shown at the likes of the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern; her photos have yielded upwards of $70,000 at auction, and in 2023, ArtReview declared her the art world’s most influential figure.

And still, the AGO determined that her statements about Gaza rendered her ineligible to be included in the museum. They took particular issue with an introduction she gave to a retrospective of her work in 2024, at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. “Antizionism has nothing to do with antisemitism. What I see in Gaza reminds me of the pogroms that my grandparents escaped,” David Velasco recalls Goldin saying that night in his essay “How Gaza Broke the Art World.” (Velasco himself was fired as Artforum’s editor-in-chief in October 2023, after the publication reprinted an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.) “Never again means never again for everyone.”

One afternoon when Tracey drops me off to see the exhibition, there are hundreds of people near the museum entrance waving Iranian flags in solidarity with anti-government protests. (This was before the war began.) Above them looms a twenty-foot black poster with Goldin’s face: “Nan Goldin: Stendhal Syndrome.” I spot two older men holding an Israeli flag. I point toward the exhibition poster and ask them if they heard about the show being cut in Toronto. They have no idea what I’m talking about. “She’s a Jewish girl, this Goldin?” asks the younger of the two. Yes, I say. “The exhibition has nothing to do with politics?” No. “I wouldn’t want to see it, but I guess it could be in the museum.”

Stendhal Syndrome is animated by a similar impulse as Goldin’s early desire to see her friends’ faces in the pages of Vogue, imagining her own oeuvre and its subjects side by side with world masterpieces. Some 400 photographs are organized around six myths from Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses, which Goldin has adapted and narrates in her gravelly smoker’s voice overtop a score by Soundwalk Collective and composer Mica Levi.

The slideshow begins with Goldin recounting a moment in which she found herself totally alone at the Louvre, experiencing the sensation of “scopophilia,” that is “the intense desire, and the fulfilment of that desire, through looking.” She cuts through close-ups of eyes both sculpted and painted.

“I fell in love with a woman in one of the paintings and went to visit her every week. I found the faces of my friends in the paintings,” she continues, and we see British artist Siobhan Liddell and Boston sisters Kimberly and Robin, early subjects of Goldin’s, alongside Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s “Jeune fille en buste” (1795) and Jan van der Straet’s “La Vanité, la Modération (ou la Modestie) et la Mort” (1569). The likeness is at first striking—Liddell has the serene self-assuredness of Guérin’s young girl, and Robin gazes up at Kimberly like Vanity does Moderation, albeit more tenderly. Goldin’s snapshots are rendered statelier and the masterpieces suddenly candid, as though vinyl bar booths are Athenian thrones, and Goldin has caught Elihu Vedder’s “Eugenia” (1879) when she thought no one was looking.

Soon, the portraits are no longer discrete but a blur; though the slideshow keeps pace at one image per every four seconds, hopeful eyes bleed between frames, and the sequence starts to feel like a dream in which faces repeat and morph into new characters who we know we know but can’t quite say how. Stendhal, Goldin says, “spoke of painting as a surface for the imagination to complete,” and the experience of watching her slideshow is like swimming in the three or so feet between Goldin and a Louvre painting.

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Goldin begins with her own adapted versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, putting herself in the same lineage as many of the Renaissance artists referenced in the piece, who all found themselves bewitched by epic transformations. Goldin has chosen six tales—of Pygmalion, Cupid, Narcissus, Diana, Hermaphroditus (referred to by Goldin as Hermaphrodite), and Orpheus—around which to orient her slideshow, in which some metamorphoses are tragic and others miraculous; Pygmalion kisses ivory into flesh, and Diana turns a hunter into a stag; genders are transient, and even death is reversible. The only constant, then, is the pursuit of love and beauty, oftentimes at the cost of all reason.

Goldin starts with Pygmalion, the “gifted young sculptor who hated women” and vows to remain celibate in favour of his art, until he falls in love with one of his creations so deeply that he kisses her, and she is alive, and he can feel “the rhythm of her arteries.” John-Baptiste Tuby’s “Galatea”—a rendering of Pygmalion’s sculpture-turned-to-life—at the gardens of Versailles appears, as do Goldin’s own muses, like her former lover Liddell, flicking between marble and pale navels so stone becomes skin and skin stone. Goldin’s images of statues are never static: some are cropped at odd angles; in others, you can make out the reflection of Goldin’s flash; and sometimes statues are blurry as though they are running away from her lens.

In 2010, the Louvre gave Goldin after-hours access for eight months and commissioned her to take photographs of their collections. “I didn’t think I was qualified even to be in there,” Goldin told the New York Times. She then spun its collection into her own exhibition, which she debuted at the museum. In 2019, she and her activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) protested art institutions around the world taking money from the billionaire Sackler family, who made their fortune from the mainstream distribution of OxyContin, to which Goldin herself was briefly addicted. Goldin and P.A.I.N. waded into the fountain underneath the Louvre’s central pyramid, holding red banners demanding that the museum “Take Down the Sackler Name,” and they did. The Pygmalion paradigm cuts both ways—it is not just the art that has awakened something in her, but she who has reshaped the Louvre.

Several museums followed suit and removed the Sackler name from their walls, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The National Gallery in London—museums that Goldin also credits in the slideshow as the sites of her Stendhal Syndrome. Goldin identifies as a frustrated filmmaker, and though Stendhal Syndrome is made up entirely of stills, there’s a cinematic quality to the sequence. In the dizzying whiplash between the images, one can recognize the feedback loop between Goldin and museum, light bouncing back and forth as they inform each other.

One morning, when we drive to the art gallery, Tracey asks me about my boyfriend converting to Judaism; when it will happen, how long it will take. We have been together for seven years and he comes to my parents’ house every week for Shabbat dinner and even went to Yom Kippur services once when I was out of town, but for us to marry, he needs to actually convert. It is a religious prescription that seems to strike his family as anachronistic, and perhaps slightly bizarre, and so my instinct is to blame my own family for mandating that he undergo the lengthy conversion process. “Wouldn’t he rather sit in rabbinical study for a year than deal with the fallout from my family for the rest of our lives?” I’m accustomed to saying. This is technically true, but not wholly, and it’s easier than explaining that it’s important to me, too, for reasons I am not fully able to articulate.

The best way to explain it would be to say that sitting in front of Stendhal Syndrome on the padded pew-like seats set up by the gallery in the dark, waiting for the orchestra to kick in, reminds me of being a kid and stumbling into synagogue late with my siblings. Every Saturday morning, I’d stare up at a rabbi, cantor, and choir, backlit by sixty-foot stained-glass windows, and wait for something to happen, to feel moved by what Goldin might call “the nearly sacred upheaval of the sublime.”

Sometimes it was a particular rendition of Adon Olam that would do it, but mostly it was the accumulation of people across time that felt holy. You don’t want to be the one to break the chain, my mother would say. These places I grew up—synagogue on Saturdays, day school during the week, summer camp for July and August—have been loud and unflinching in their support for Israel, in spite of the mounting atrocities in Gaza, beholden to the same ideology that influenced the AGO to deprive the public of Goldin’s exhibition at the last minute. And yet, there’s something I can’t get past; an attachment to these spaces that feels impossible to relinquish. I recognize the feeling of loving a place mired in contradictions, of loving it so much you want it to change. In flickering between the sacred and profane, Goldin fixates on something eternal to be salvaged from these institutions that have been so thoroughly compromised, while nonetheless remaining steadfast in her devotion to changing them as they have changed her.

Goldin is an artist preoccupied with memory: “I used to think I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough,” she says. “In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” I saw the exhibition six times, and every time I cried when Goldin’s photo of Cookie Mueller’s wedding to Vittorio Scarpati flashed onscreen, set to Goldin narrating the doomed love of Orpheus and Eurydice. Scarpati and Mueller would both die of AIDS-related illnesses just a short number of years later, and yet for a moment, they are alive and in love.

There are no Classical, Renaissance, or Baroque pieces currently on display in the Vancouver Art Gallery; for now, if Vancouverites want to see one in their own city, they can do so at Stendhal Syndrome. And so long as Goldin’s work is allowed within the confines of the museum, then this movement—between artist, patron, and institution—can flourish. But excluded from the doors of the AGO, the circuit breaks.

Goldin has signed an open letter calling for the AGO to have more transparency and “curatorial independence” and for Schulich to step down; the AGO is dissolving the committee that declined Goldin’s work. If these institutions are to serve the immortality that Goldin’s piece so reveres—that was able to bring Stendhal, centuries earlier, to his knees—they cannot remain frozen by donor pressure. In Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote, “Everything changes, nothing perishes.” More than a timeless observation, this can be taken as an imperative.

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