KASSAM: The Met Gala Theme – J.G. Ballard’s Garden of Time – Is Perfect to Highlight The Barbarism Around Us.

When J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story, The Garden of Time, was announced as the theme for this year’s Met Gala several months ago, I printed off a copy. It seemed oddly thoughtful for such a plastic event. In all likelihood, it was an entirely superficial decision. J.G. Ballard’s garden has flowers. Flowers are pretty. Time is crazy. That sort of thing.But whether the organizers know it or not, The Garden of Time is the perfect choice for this year’s Met Gala, which takes place just a short walk from Columbia University.

It’s a story about Count Axel and his wife, who live in a Palladian villa, with a garden full of “time flowers” which can be plucked to rewind the world around them. On the horizon? An army “composed of a vast confused throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganised tide.”It evokes the opening scenes of Jean Raspail’s revered and reviled book Camp of the Saints, in which hundreds of thousands of migrants descend upon Europe, as the natives observe, waiting—and in some cases hoping—to be overrun.Mozart rings out over the grounds as Axel and his wife continue to break the stems to defy the hordes. But the flowers are finite, and the inevitable occurs:

"Heaving and swearing, the outer edge of the mob reached the knee-high remains of the wall enclosing the ruined estate, hauled their carts over it and along the dry ruts of what had once been an ornate drive. The ruin, formerly a spacious villa, barely interrupted the ceaseless tide of humanity. The lake was empty, fallen trees rotting at its bottom, an old bridge rusting into it. Weeds flourished among the long grass in the lawn, over-running the ornamental pathways and carved stone screens."

In the end, statues of the Count and Countess are the only things left. Time consumed them, and the wailing mob occupied the villa’s ruins.It’s also reminiscent of the lines from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, included here, which in turn inspired my favorite series of paintings: Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, pictured below.

The Garden of Time is an almost perfect metaphor for the barbarism we have allowed to corrupt civilization.The Met Gala, taking place close to the heaving and swearing hordes in New York, offers poetic irony. And whether Anna Wintour meant it or not (likely not), she will tonight host a living play about the destructiveness of mass migration and cultural relativism, slap bang in the middle of Manhattan.

I don’t follow fashion, but due to my recent renewed interest in movies, the various film awards shows come into my peripheral vision. These overlap in turn with fashion centric events like the Met Gala and with the awards shows in other entertainment domains (e.g. the various music awards). In today’s world, the big money people who are pulling the strings are looking for synergies and crossovers, and there are a lot of odd appearances. Basically I keep a side eye out for actors that I like to see if they are particularly stunning or, sometimes, to see how badly they’ve humiliated themselves. The big fashion houses sign celebrities to big contracts to moonlight as runway models at these big events, and some of the outfits are truly cringe inducing.

Anyhow, the Met Gala has been off in bizarro world for a long time. It is a fundraiser for a branch of the Metropolitan Museum. Serving as chairman of the annual big dollar fundraising event for a major nonprofit organization is a thankless job. Usually the chairman’s duty consists of sitting with the staff to decide on the general contours and then working one’s rolodex to relentless twist the arms of friends and business associates to write a big check. I’ve done enough political fundraising to respect the people who are willing to take on these jobs and do them well. In many organizations this is the kind of task that gets rotated through the up and coming members as a thankless task that you do to get your ticket punched on the march through the offices. Sometimes, if an organization is lucky, it will find someone who has a knack for the job and who sticks around for a few years.

Without pretending to understand this particular domain, my layman’s sense is that the Met Gala is an outlier (at least in part, but I think it’s a substantial part) because Anna Wintour took it over many years ago and has made it her own. By all accounts, she has turned it into a fundraising juggernaut for the Met. Kudos to her for that.

At some point, however, the Met Gala morphed into becoming The Anna Wintour Invitational. She is who she is. She runs Vogue and is wholly in bed with the big fashion houses. She clearly has an appetite for the outlandish edge of high fashion. She seems to like shocking for the sake of shocking, and there seems to be a standing invitation to the name designers to use the Met Gala as an opportunity to let their freak out. This happens in some of the other fashion shows as well, but those are events organized by the fashion industry itself. The Met Gala, in the final analysis, is run by the Metropolitan Museum — but the Museum has apparently gotten drunk on the money that Anna Wintour raises, and it has let the lunatics take over the asylum.

2024 Met Gala: The Good, the Cringe, the Weird and the Pathetic

The arrivals looks.

I'm not going to try to break down the list, but Truly Stupendously Awful looks are in the minority. But the people who actually look good -- good as in classy -- are also in the minority. The usual pathetic categories are much in evidence: older women trying to dress like 30-something sex goddesses; fat people in tight, revealing outfits; men -- not all of them gay -- going for the queer freakshow look; the beautiful young women who would draw stares if you dressed them in a burlap bag wearing the desperate "look at me, look at me" costumes.

The Met Gala has become a parody of itself. The Kartrashians. Notorious society whores. The dozens of people none of us have heard of who are supposed to be "celebrities" of some sort.

Anna Wintour controls the guest list and is said to approve every outfit. I can only wonder how a list like this gets compiled. I suppose it's all a matter of the checks being written, which makes me wonder what the money people think they are getting from this kind of display. I don't fault runway models for wearing outlandish costumes on the catwalk; it's a job, they are walking mannequins, and if the check is big enough, I'm ok with it as long as there's not nudity involved. But follow the money. How does this sort of thing raise money for the Metropolitan Museum?

Once upon a time, the Met Gala used to have traditional big donors, high powered professionals and business people who could write big checks. Maybe those people still contribute, but they're not the people being photographed and put forward as the face of the event. The Hollywood people are a minority, and I wonder if they're looking at each other and whispering, "what the heck are we doing here?" Being invited to the Met Gala used to be a thing. Maybe the event is still coasting on its past reputation, sort of like elite universities that have gone over the side and are now discovering how fast their stature can erode.

Anna Wintour is 74. How much longer will she stick around? And I wonder if the Met Gala will reset once she steps down. Credit where credit is due: she has raised a ton of money for the Museum.

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