Patronage of the arts by social elites has a deep history. Artwork itself has functioned as an asset class since before capitalism, while the funding of arts institutions has helped the wealthy cement their social status. For the modern rich, support for the arts has long been a favored means of laundering tarnished reputations. Prior to the recent round of sanctions and asset freezes, the Russian superrich gave generously to arts institutions. In 2008, David Koch donated $100 million for the renovation of Lincoln Center.

And then there are the Sacklers, the billionaire family behind Purdue Pharma and the drug OxyContin, both widely blamed for the ongoing opioid epidemic. Some of the most lavish arts benefactors on the planet, the Sackler family has given massive sums to many of the world’s most prestigious museums and galleries. Perhaps most notably, the family name long adorned a wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art housing the Temple of Dendur (featured memorably in When Harry Met Sally). For a time, these arts investments granted the family an elevated cultural status even as its drugs immiserated millions.

The Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras, depicts the efforts of photographer Nan Goldin to hold the Sackler family accountable. A star in the art world, Goldin rose to prominence with her 1985 slideshow and subsequent book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a collection of photographs intimately and unwaveringly depicting the lives of bohemians, artists, and drug users in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “What interests Goldin,” Hinton Als wrote in 2016, “is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups — the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues.”