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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........

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