David O'Mahony: Met Gala may not be your thing but it shows art hasn't gone out of fashion
Rachel Zegler ethereal dress at the Met Gala this week was inspired by the 18th-century painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. Photo: Matt Crossick/PA
Art is many things to many people, and probably should always be. Life can be nasty, brutish, and short as it is but would be dull, turgid, and fusty if everybody looked at the same painting and came away with the same interpretation.
But, as the noted philosopher Anton Ego said in , not everybody can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. Or art, in any case. Like beauty, its quality is in the eye of the beholder, as this week managed to highlight in very different ways.
Horror author Daniel Kraus’s , about five American soldiers in the First World War who encounter an angel caught in barbed wire, won a Pulitzer. This filled my fetid, black, horror-loving heart with something at least approaching satisfaction, if not delight. Validation for the form, and all of that.
Many, many people felt it emphasised how horror was having a moment in the spotlight.
And it's fair to say that the success of and the film , as beautiful as it is gripping, have both highlighted that what is often dismissed as genre fiction can be a vehicle for artistic achievement.
is effectively one sentence, though that doesn’t quite capture its artistry. I’m reading it now; it’s in a stream of consciousness style but broken into chapters and paragraphs. They just all (so far) start with a lower case “and”.
This is weird, true, but it sort of suits the theme and conjures up a sense of how exhaustion and real-life horror can put one into a sort of somnambulism, a survival mode where you’re no longer your best self. It’s a hard technique, but so far he’s holding my attention better than Joyce did with , so he’s off to a good start.
War may be hell, but its presentation can be high art.
Similarly grim elements were among those revisited in a variety of ways at the Met Gala (which is weird at the best of times).
Rachel Zegler’s outfit — a flowing white dress with a strip of voile covering her eyes — had a sort of ethereal feel as if it were a modern Lady Justice, but was itself inspired by the 18th-century painting . Specifically, it was inspired by the outfit Grey wears as she, blindfolded, feels about on her knees for the headsman’s block.
Not the sort of image that one normally looks at and says “oh, I need to make a dress out of that”, or perhaps that simply means I’m not fashion forward enough.
Zegler, on Instagram, said she chose it because Grey “was queen for nine days before paying the price, like we all do”. Grey had been given the crown of England and Ireland by her cousin Edward, son of Henry VIII, but hadn’t sought it out.
She was ultimately executed for high treason, mostly on the insistence of the all-male privy council of Queen Mary (as in Bloody Mary, who wanted Grey to live). Having unwittingly been propelled to centre stage, she was brought down by male envy and plotting.
Maybe that was Zegler’s point — the fact that so many people focused more on how she moved her jaw than the outfit would sort of support that.
The dress was certainly arresting, and perhaps in some way she was attempting to bury the legacy of her appearance in — a sort of growing up, or perhaps a commentary on the backlash she received personally over that film, not to mention the general critical reaction to said film.
Fashion, as the Met organisers made clear in the theme, can be art.
A more, shall we say, unusual ensemble on display was Lena Dunham’s, a feathered and sequined one that almost hid her entirely. Except it was supposed to represent the blood spatter from the 17th-century painting .
You know it. It's a biblical scene representing the beheading of an Assyrian general. In the painting, he’s on his back and being held down while Judith slits his throat. In doing so, she saves the city, by the way — she wasn’t just out randomly swinging a knife.
The painting was by a woman, Artemisia Gentileschi, and is seen as an illustration of female strength and agency. But why did Dunham choose to dress as the blood spatter? I mean, it’s not even the focus of the actual artwork.
Zegler’s, at least, could stand by itself without knowing the origin story. As could Heidi Klum dressed as a marble statue, even if she looked a bit like one of those statues in that hunt you when you’re not looking.
That said, just because you or I don’t quite get the medium or the message doesn’t mean it isn’t artistic. I’ve written plenty of grotesqueries that you mightn’t consider art.
Given that, I can think of no better excursion than the Capuchin crypts in Rome, while my wife often brings up how I put on the Japanese film when we started going out it's clear that we all have our foibles. Let he/she/they without sin cast the first blood spatter, I suppose.
Ultimately, if we’re thinking, talking or writing about it, then perhaps the desired point has been made — and that’s an art in itself.
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