Met Gala: Spectacle or spectacular?

Party time

It was the Met Gala this week. 

You know, outlandishly crazy things being worn in public by…outlandishly crazy things.

For anyone not familiar with it, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, known as the Met, hosts an annual fundraiser party for celebrities and notable creatives. It has a reputation not only for attracting the biggest names in show business, but also for their outfits which always seem to take fashion to a whole new, and occasionally rather surreal, level. Ice cube handbag, anyone?

A previous moment of sartorial note was in 2022 when Kim Kardashian turned up wearing Marylin Monroe’s original ‘Happy Birthday Mr President’ dress.

This year, the dress code was ‘The Garden of Time’, taken from J. G Ballard’s short story of the same title. It is about a pair of well-to-dos who use their magical garden to reverse time, thus holding back the encroaching war outside. With an Israel-Palestine protest going on outside, the perfect irony was lost on no one.

Doja Cat decided to simply wear a wet T-shirt and let her mascara run. Cotton, she points out, is the world’s most common flower, so she’s bang on trend. Presumably, it was raining in her garden. IKEA were so impressed they copied it.

I’ll wait here while you have a look at the costumes and read some J. G. Ballard…

Can I have my jeans back, please?

Thanks for coming back. Did you like Ed Sheeran’s turquoise suit?

It’s easy to scoff at these creations. Many are utterly impractical. Most are completely unaffordable. Some looked rather draughty in delicate areas.

What does all this have to do with a serious art museum?

Arguably quite a lot. At a time when the arts are struggling for funding, this brings media attention. It also helps clear away the stuffy reputation of museums, with their glass cases of fusty old pots and paintings of 18th-century men in tights. The world’s greatest fashion designers are undoubtedly great artists, using textiles, meat, and the human frame to express their vision just as the painter uses paint and a canvas. It is living art.

Fashion designers also contribute a lot financially to the creative economy. They also create jobs for other creatives such as photographers.

But does it trivialise and distort art? Is it creating more ‘spectacle’ than ‘meaning’ while reinforcing stereotypes of exclusivity?

Grimace for the camera!

Douggie Wallace is another controversial artist, but he works from the other side of the lens – as a photographer.

His Harrodsburg project is a brutal portrayal of the rich and famous with their Botox, bling and bad taste captured up close and personal. 

Who is actually exploiting who here? The Rolex watch-toting Harrodsburg subject garishly putting themselves and their Ferrari on show while another sector of society sleeps in Cardboard City? Or the photographer portraying them?

Wallace reminds us that despite the glitz and glamour of the Met Ball, celebrities and the wealthy are really just as vulnerable in front of the camera as the rest of us. Lip filler, designer clothes and flawless makeup hide the physical blemishes from the assembled paparazzi. But Wallace shows us that well-chosen timing can reveal what is happening inside. He photographs those moments that lie beneath the fragile veneer of public image we create for ourselves.

Perspective

The Met Gala and its designer costumes clearly don’t reflect real life. But in his essay on the photographic work of Minor White, Robert Adams argued that this isn’t necessarily a problem (Beauty in Photography, p. 97). He cites Aristotle’s claim that the improbable was perfectly ok to use in performance – just as long as we are still able to relate it to the real world off-stage.

Some would claim that the same criticisms could be levied at modern art installations too.

Young girls frequently dress as princesses at parties. It’s improbable that there are twenty-five 7-year-old real princesses in attendance. We don’t scoff at the imaginary costume worn by Batman, yet we wouldn’t dress like that for buying bread at Aldi – just as much as we wouldn’t wear a Met Gala outfit either.

Maybe we find it easier to relate our contemporary lives to the imaginary happenings on the Starship Enterprise than we do an actual art museum. That’s probably an essay in itself.

I suggest that the job of artists, celebrities, fashion designers and photographers is to relentlessly stretch Aristotle’s link between the improbable and reality. That’s where fresh ideas, new art movements and inspiration are found. Equally, the celebrities at the Met Gala need to make sure they don’t stretch it too far. If they break it, the Met Ball celebrities risk becoming irrelevant. It seems that art and partying are like most other things – a balancing act.

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Image Credit: Billie Eilish at the 2021 Met Gala, 13 September 2021. Originally uploaded by Vogue (U.S.) on 16 September 2021. 1200×980 unedited. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFxB2QZTqoE&t=436. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Condé Nast (through Vogue Taiwan).