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As it turns out, the domestication of funk, which might have made Goldin quaint, works for her in a way. It reminds us of her indisputable virtue: funk, undomesticated. Whatever the pleasures of Rent, which are shrewd and abundant, it offers the Lower East Side in captivity, fetchingly confined within Broadway conventions. And those Klein ads--is that grime in the models' bangs or only hair gel caking? When Goldin descends below the taboo line, she's not just down there on a visit. She lives there, or she has. She reminds us of what the real world at night looks like, full of bright light but also sour light and scenes that wouldn't sell much cologne. Friends on the toilet is one of her subthemes. So are blunt sex and bad housekeeping.
So if intimacy were everything, Goldin's pictures would have everything. But it doesn't always pay to expect that when you open a door onto private moments, feeling or knowledge automatically steps through. Touring her show can be like spending too much time flipping through somebody else's photo album: Who are all those people just hanging around in front of the camera? After half a dozen uneventful shots of another of Goldin's lovers you sense what's missing when you come across her 1982 picture called Brian in the Cabana, Puerto Juarez, Mexico. He's reclining on one arm in a shadowy hut, looking at some sunstruck foliage through the slats of an open, louvered glass window. In most of her pictures Goldin's friends don't get out much in daylight. With a pensive expression, Brian regards the natural world in a manageable portion about the size you might get through a TV screen.
There are too few shots like that. What's worse is that in some places this show seems to ask us to sympathize with Goldin's subjects instead of consider what she made of them. The real catastrophes of recent years--AIDS, drug deaths, brutal dealings between men and women--have produced a sentimental climate in some parts of the art world. That's the mood in Ross Bleckner's oil-paint gloamings and in the mournful photo assemblages of Mike and Douglas Starn. And it's in the scarlet wallpaper of Goldin's empty hotel rooms and her graveyard bouquets. Is this where all the hard questions end up, in a chapel where our voices are hushed and where grumbling about the pictures is impolite?
Ask that question before images of the battered and dying and you risk seeming indifferent to grief. But not to ask it opens the way to aesthetic blackmail, allowing the fact of suffering to cancel your doubts about the pictures that convey it. Or try to. Goldin has felt the blows of the past decade or so as hard as anybody. You wish sometimes that her work were as acute as her pain.