I first discovered Nan Goldin’s work when I was a teenager. Her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986–, was a passport to a damaged fairy tale. Her camera lens was a magic mirror that inverted the values of the straight suburban world: ugliness as beauty, the profane rendered sacred.

Like Andy Warhol, Goldin inhabits a downtown world of junkies, drag queens, artists, and prostitutes, bearing witness to their lives with her cool gaze. Unlike Diane Arbus’s images, with their passing flashes of empathy, Goldin’s portraits are of her people. In documenting her adopted family, Goldin’s

On December 13, 2019, the day that Boris Johnson secured his victory in the UK general election, I wanted to be angry. I wanted to be angry at entitlement, capitalism, and state-sanctioned inequality; at populism, bigotry, and dumb-as-all-hell patriotism. But, truthfully, I was numb. I was cold, hungover, emptied out. My present offered me nothing. I offered nothing in return.

Hours after learning that the Conservative Party had obtained its largest majority since 1987, I visited “The Great Offender,” an exhibition of fourteen paintings by Caroline Coon. In part, I was drawn to Coon’s history of