Last fall, in New York, Larry Gagosian’s prestigious gallery was drawing a diverse crowd. It included the usual art world professionals, as well as many young people who appeared to be art students. One attendee, his body covered in tattoos, carried a drawing board on his back, secured with leather straps and a bicycle chain. His girlfriend, sporting pink hair, wore a bunny ear headband with a disconcerting level of seriousness. Further along, a young man with an androgynous look had a green keffiyeh draped around his neck, a sign of support for Palestine.
All had flocked to Chelsea to see Nan Goldin, a leading figure in the artistic underground, known for her commitment to a range of social causes (AIDS awareness, LGBT rights, feminism, ecology, and addiction recovery). They studiously took notes in front of the artist’s slideshow Stendhal Syndrome (2024)—named after the condition that overwhelms a viewer with emotion in response to the beauty of art—a piece that would not be out of place in an art school curriculum. The concept is simple yet innovative: Nan Goldin juxtaposes photographs of classical masterpieces from the world’s most prestigious museums with autobiographical portraits of her friends, lovers, and family. Today, the work can be seen at the Saint-Blaise church, as part of the Rencontres d’Arles, while the photographer is the winner of the Kering I Women in Motion prize for photography 2025.
The visual similarity between these raw contemporary photographs—color-saturated snapshots on slides—and the classical works of art history (paintings and sculptures arranged according to the aesthetic conventions of their time) is striking. Displayed on the gallery walls in a grid format or projected on screen, their composition, subjects, forms, colors, and the posture of the figures are remarkably alike, if not nearly identical. This blurring of lines between past and present, intimate history and official art, the profane and the sacred, ultimately dismantles traditional art hierarchies. Amateur aesthetics get their revenge.
In a voice-over, accompanied by a score from Soundwalk Collective, Nan Goldin reinterprets six myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She draws connections between the great figures of mythology and the members of her own community with whom she has shared, or still shares, her life. Transvestites become muses, while her former lovers are transformed into potential Narcissuses. The body of Tony, Goldin’s lover dressed in jeans, mirrors the Death of Orpheus, wrapped in a blue sheet in Émile Lévy’s 1866 painting. Goldin’s companions, through their fortunes and misfortunes, blend into their mythical counterparts. Beauty, death, love, and sex echo one another across centuries.
Thus, many diptychs or triptychs explore stories of love and loss in antiquity, evoking the pleasure and terror of Stendhal Syndrome. Throughout her fifty-year career, Nan Goldin has fearlessly explored the depths of the human condition, capturing raw, everyday moments that reveal universal experiences of love, loss, and the truths that connect us all. Stendhal Syndrome is no exception.
“Stendhal Syndrome” by Nan Goldin is on view at the Saint-Blaise Church in Arles, as part of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, from July 7 to October 5, 2025.
