Costume Art

The Met Gala, held a week ago last Monday, is supposedly the world’s “most prestigious and glamorous event.” What is not well appreciated is that it supports not the Metropolitan Museum as a whole but just the Costume Institute, a distinct entity within the Met. The event is organized by Vogue, and that publication’s long-time editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour (famously portrayed by Meryl Streep in the thinly disguised roman à clef The Devil Wears Prada), co-chairs the institute. There is usually an associated exhibition, and this year’s—“Costume Art”—was a major one, displaying about 400 items and introducing the big new galleries directly off the main hall. This past Monday, a week after the gala, there was a cocktail reception for the show’s opening, and it was preceded by a lecture from one of the curators. The lecture was startling.

The exhibition’s purpose was not, as might have been expected, to display art. No, we were informed that the purpose was to show that all body types are equal. That is, the exhibition was to be prescriptive, instructing us on the virtues of equivalence: everything’s as meaningful as everything else (or at least must be pretended to be). This sort of silly social agenda-pushing is not uncommon today, although one doesn’t expect to encounter it at the Met. It can be at the level of whole peoples: primitive societies allegedly being equivalent to Western civilization is a common shibboleth, as if Eskimos were on the verge of E=Mc² when Einstein beat them to it, or Aborigines had narrowly missed arriving at the Moon before Apollo 11. Individuals, too, are supposedly equivalent, although one may be hard-pressed to see that the bum peeing on a wall outside Grand Central is in fact as intelligent as a professor and as productive as a magnate. So it is now in art: ugliness is beautiful, we are told, and disabilities are enabling—it all sounded like something from Orwell.

After such an introduction, one feared that the show would be very dull, but in fact the artworks spoke for themselves, as good art always does, and in contrast to the everything-is-equally-valid palaver that we had been fed beforehand the exhibits were often engaging, sometimes striking, and operating entirely on their own individual terms, unaware of any claim that they were in the service of some imaginary collective kumbaya. The pieces were distinct, disparate, and irreconcilable with political correctness, running the gamut from classic glamorous beauty to a Poe-like body-horror (see accompanying photograph, two blood-red and veiny Yuima Nakazato-designed gowns that Morticia Addams might wear, should she intend using her pruning shears on you instead of the roses).

To put it bluntly, the exhibition itself blew a big metaphorical raspberry at its organizers.

But the bad taste from that introductory lecture would not go away. A curatorship at the Met is supposed to be a pinnacle of art scholarship, and one would have hoped for high standards of academic objectivity and intellectual rigor, not something that sounds like a post from some “influencer’s” blog. This 1984-style propaganda feels like a rot that’s run out of control, spreading deep into the sinews of society, and this author can’t help recalling the words of the historian Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.” Self-evident nonsense spouted by politicians trying to garner votes is one thing; from a curator at the Met it is quite another, and it makes one fear for the future.