The Met Gala happened recently. For those unfamiliar, it’s ostensibly a fundraiser for The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is also a big fashion who-si-whatsit. It began in 1948, and it’s gone through a few iterations to get to the big celebrity blow-out that we’ve come to know. In the age of social media, there’s been a lot more attention on it from the average person. Live reactions. Critiques on the costuming. That sort of thing.
Since the first COVID shutdowns, class-consciousness trickled down to a new audience, and the Met Gala now tends to trigger an annual uptick in online conversations around wealth inequality.
Which, great! Let me be clear on that. I’m not a Met Gala apologist, and the inclusion of Jeff Bezos this year is certainly a…decision.
At the same time, your average social media billionaire-gourmand draws these very cursory conclusions that just go on to look like the same hot take over and over again ad nauseam.
Biggest example:
“This is just like the Hunger Games!”
1.) Please, dear god, read another book and/or watch another movie that covers the same themes from a different direction. I recommend the Snowpiercer graphic novel. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and House of Stairs by William Sleator are some other good choices, if memory serves. Throw a little Mad Max: Fury Road in there and analyze the visual difference in the styling of the wives vs the warboys vs Furiosa. It’s good shit.
2.) Only…kinda? But not really? Working class people engaging in a physical competition with each other for a country-wide audience (fostered by a culture of gambling) that creates wealth for the upper class while not personally profiting the competitors in a significant way except in extreme circumstances. That’s not the Met Gala, that’s college football.
3.) Yeah, no shit. Where do you think Suzanne Collins pulled the idea from? The theme of “the wealthy flaunting showy extravagance in peculiar ways in the midst of vast far-reaching poverty as stark contrast” is a common theme in fiction because that’s what real life looks like. I’m glad that fiction helped you see the pattern better, but come on, y’all. The eccentric fashion of The Capitol is meant to communicate their wealth because that’s a pre-established visual language. Not the other way around.
The yearly cries of “PANEM!” have clearly become a personal pet peeve.
But also, it sort of reveals what I’m talking about it terms of the general misunderstanding of how art and art patronage fits into the scaffolding of capitalism.
Events like the Met Gala aren’t above reproach. Critique them down to the nails and call them out for bad actors and actions. At the same time, these big events like the Oscars, Grammys, fashion week, etc. aren’t, by themselves, an orchestrated conspiracy to intellectually subdue the masses. It’s weird rich people promoting and engaging with art.
And art, as a whole, owes a massive amount of its endurance and capital viability to weird rich people.
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a major landmark in the history of art, was a commission from Pope Julius II. Michelangelo, reportedly, hated every moment of it, but he got paid. The entire Italian Renaissance was funded by a single family of bankers. Having been on both sides of the vendor table, money is what makes the artist alley happen. There’s some full-stack developer out there paying off a furry artist’s student loans one commission at a time. And even if you’re going to give away your art for free as a message to stoke rebellion in the masses, a can of spray paint is still $6 and you can’t do shit if you’ve died of starvation. We’re all locked in the money cage together.
The major functional difference between the average Patreon or Kickstarter and the Met Gala is scope and visibility. They have the shared end goal to crowdsource the continued existence of an ongoing artistic endeavor.
The Met Gala has been what’s keeping the Costume Institute open.
It begs the question “what else would you have them do when the other option is shutting down?” According to the New York Times [sorry, ironically, you might run into a paywall, but I still got a site my sources], they’re working on a solution that doesn’t rely on the Gala. But they could only get to that point because of what the Gala brings in in the first place. Then consider the people who got paid for their work that night. It’s a job creating event.
This is, again, not a defense of the Met Gala, but, rather, places it in the context of how it redistributes money. In practical terms of ethical cash-flow: “rich people” to “archival and curatorial art collection” isn’t the worst possible option. Despite even my own list of grievances with how this particular system works and how I think these people should be using their money at a macro-scale, it is, unfortunately, still kind of a net positive. Of all possible evils, the co-leads of Heated Rivalry taking the opportunity to dress-up as Pokemon gym leaders is just not the top of the list of world-shaking moral dilemmas.
If it’s not something you want to pay attention to because you feel as though it’s a “distraction,” cool, whatever. It’s going to blip out of the news cycle in a couple of days, and the places that actually matter will continue reporting on the world at-large. At the same time, you’re allowed to have a day or two where you just look at the pretty dresses.
And whatever sits in between those two.
Vocal moral indignation on social media about a fancy dress event doesn’t stop it from happening or get rid of the financial or artistic impetus at the core of it. It doesn’t stop rich people from being rich and spending their money on imploding submarines, trips to space, and anti-trans legislation. The limited avenues we have to affect change there all come down to how we use our own money, and that’s a conversation that requires room for complexity and nuance.
We are no longer restricted to what is delivered to us in the gladiatorial arena. The internet has given us the ability to engage in whatever we want to engage in of any intellectual depth we prefer. And because people are people, they’re going to take their bread and choose the circus sometimes. Either way, we still want the clowns to get paid.
Pixels and Pins Studio 