the end of the garden of time
why are we still pretending the Met Gala means anything?
Most years, I actually like to tune into the Met Gala.
I’m a hater at heart–and I say at heart because it truly does come from love–and mocking the elite class for paying $75,000 to show the world an off-theme fit with absolutely no creativity is usually something I find at least kind of fun.
When the first Monday of May rolls around, I like to imagine what I could come up with if I had the funds and resources available to me that these folks do, and feel superior when the rich and famous are forced to confront their absolute lack of imagination:
In previous years I’ve yelled things like “It’s not about looking hot!!! It’s about being art!!!” as though any one of them could hear me, or would care if they did. It felt true enough to believe and gave me an excuse to both fawn over the opulence, imagine how I’d do it “better”, and still allow me to feel righteous in my engagement of it.
But–let’s be honest–I was being willingly duped. The Met Gala is an intentional display of wealth and exclusivity masquerading as an art conservation project. Rather than elevating the importance of art in our culture, it diminishes it by swapping out actual art for celebrity beauty.
It’s about art, we’re told, as we’re shown the rich and famous who paid $75,000 a head to walk.
It’s about art, we’re told, which is why we remember Karlie Kloss looking camp in the eye, and nothing within the exhibit itself.
It’s about the art, we’re told as we judge the beauty and fashion of the wealthy as though that’s art1 and wonder what happens when they get inside.
The theme for this year’s Met Gala was The Garden of Time, based on the 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, which you can read here. If you just want the summary, the story goes like this:
Within a gorgeous, ornate villa lives Count Axel and his unnamed wife. Their home is full of art and artifacts, all precious, rare and beautiful. They live surrounded by a beautiful garden, full of crystal time flowers, and beyond their garden is a wide, empty expanse, keeping them isolated and happy. When Count Axel is in the garden one day, he sees “an enormous army”–which turns out to be unorganized ranks of men and women, with a few “ragged soldiers” amongst the throngs. From then on, each day Count Axel plucks and destroys the time flowers one by one, each granting him and his wife a bit more time in their luxury before the mob reaches them. Eventually, the flowers run out and as the mob reaches the villa, they turn to statues while the grandeur around them rots away.
The time flowers are described as precious:
The flowers grew to a height of about six feet, their slender stems, like rods of glass, bearing a dozen leaves, the once transparent fronds frosted by the fossilized veins. At the peak of each stem was the time flower, the size of a goblet, the opaque outer petals enclosing the crystal heart. Their diamond brilliance contained a thousand faces, the crystal seeming to drain the air of its light and motion. As the flowers swayed slightly in the evening air, they glowed like flame-tipped spears.
A finite resource being hoarded by the Count and Countess, while the ragged mob struggles to reach their gates. The threat is ambiguous, and the mob is continually described as disorganized and uncoordinated by Count Axel–less an army, more of a mass migration. The Count and Countess, threatened with the end of their opulence, extend their time amongst their possessions, habitually destroying the time flowers, knowing the whole time it won’t change their fate–it will only kill the time garden.
This year, to walk the carpet at the Met Gala, you first had to pay $75,000. Then you had to walk by this:
Crush the time flower. Ignore the mob. Spend another night in glamour. Cement the iconography of your status, and leave the mob to inherit the rot you leave behind.
In the wake of the Met Gala this year, people are rightfully pointing out the horrifying juxtaposition between this display of wealth and privilege, and the photos coming out of Rafah as Israel obliterates the last remaining shelter for Palestinians:
It’s not just the jarringly different worlds these photos represent–it’s the fact that, like Count Axel’s time amongst his riches and his destruction of the time flowers, this idolization of decadence is what allows these atrocities to continue until the ruling class has left us with nothing but ash. The celebration of one world creates the landscape for the destruction of the other.
Like the night of the Oscars, the glamour and decadence and irresistibility of celebrity kept American eyes away from Palestine. Unlike the night of the Oscars, none of the elite in attendance made any attempt–no matter how insuffienct–to call attention to the genocide in Palestine. Not a single artists for ceasefire pin on the art institute’s red carpet.
Students across the globe are sacrificing their grades, their housing, their careers and their safety to stand in solidarity with Palestine, to use the power they have to pressure their institutions to divest from Israel because–as was beautifully artuclated in this video–the commitment to Palestine runs deeper than fears for safety, for careers, or for paychecks. It is in fact a funedmental obligation for those of us paying taxes to a government that then hands our hard earned dollars over to Israel to commit genocide in our name.
Art is meant to be a tool for meaning making, for conversation, for disrupting and dismantling oppresive norms, for connecting experiences and social issues and human relationships. It reckons with the world it exists within. It’s a friend to social movements and protests and community engagement.
What meaning is made watching the rich and famous walk the red carpet? What could they have to say that would be more powerful than simply not showing up? What purpose does it serve, other than to reinforce our deification of wealth and beauty, while simultaneously masking the atrocities our government and our dollars facilitiate?
$75,000 and the power of social influence could change alot. What if even one of the attendees had used that money to buy eSims for Palestinians or donate to UNRWA or fulfill a mutual aid request from a Palestinian family directly?
Instead, the stars walking the carpet helped do the work of erasing Palestine from our cultural narrative while Israel continued their genocidal project of ethnic cleansing.
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Obviously fashion can be art. But art generally requires saying something other than “look how much money I have,” which is why I’m not counting Met Gala fashion as art.
It was so bizarre to go on social media and see posts about the Met Gala interspersed with news about Rafah. Really fucking dystopian. Here in Brazil something very similar is happening, we had Madonna's concert on Copacabana Beach, which gathered more than 1.6 million people, all in the same week that floods destroyed houses in Rio Grande Do Sul, leaving 395 thousand people homeless and more than 1.4 million affected. The News would talk about the tragedy, and in the next second show clips of the concert. And this all happend in the same week as the Met, and Rafah, so going on social media at all was insane, but i also would feel guilty to try to distract myself with anything, as if all of this wasn't happening.