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The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own muscle, between breasts raised towards God The perfect face of Donyale Luna, all bush baby eyes and strings of jewels in sunlight Cigarette smoke sucked back in through dusty lips The indistinguishable thrusts of dancing or sex or devotion It could also be the violence of caged dogs, palm leaves dishevelled by storms, a relentless tide and the wreckage of bodies on cracked earth Composed entirely of found video and dedicated to Luna, a supermodel and actress now forty years dead from heroin, Sirens (2019) is Nan Goldin’s memorial to the act of getting high   The success of Goldin’s work – its drama, her magnetism – has burdened her over the years with the unhappy credits that are often the risk of influence In the decade that followed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a medley of photos in which the pale and angular people of her life are splayed lawlessly over rooms and each other, then-US-President Bill Clinton accused ‘Dan [sic] Goldin’ of trailblazing ‘heroin chic’ The term came to designate the era’s romance with strung-out, starved depravity Goldin’s 1996 photographs of sixteen-year-old model James King, taken for a profile in the New York Times Style Magazine, distilled a darkly erotic aesthetic that disturbed as much as it seduced A junior veteran of drugs, King’s was the questionable glamour of a skinny girl with the face of a child – most beautiful on waking, as a friend reported, when she’s ‘coughing her guts out’   But just as our culture compulsively points at ringleaders, so does it love a messiah In recent years Goldin has swung from unholy harbinger of heroin to saviour of America’s opioid crisis Since early 2019, Goldin’s activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have repurposed art institutions as stages of dissent against the art world’s taste for Sackler family money – donations from the Pharma moguls known to have deceitfully flogged OxyContin as a safe