Rob Brezsny is a fine writer. I subscribe to his blog as a vote in favor of excellence, also to endorse his message of self-cultivation. We journey together.

I touched on the May 4 Met Gala in a past post. Rob expanded upon my thoughts with eloquence. I will pass on his words to you. If you’d like to check out his newsletter the URL will be at the end of this post.

Sorry not sorry.

I’ve got to vent a minute about the MET GALA:

Watching the Bezos-sponsored Met Gala on May 4, I felt disgust.
Historically, I’ve had no quarrel with the pageantry of celebrity. Glamour can be a form of theater, and theater can be a sacrament. I’ve never begrudged movie stars and pop royalty their satin, sequins, cosmetics, and choreographed magnificence. If you are blessed with beauty, charisma, and the resources to ornament yourself like a pagan deity, by all means, have your splendid parade.

But this year it felt grotesque. Why? Because the American Empire is trembling and burning.

We are in the midst of an ongoing moral emergency, as authoritarianism metastasizes, cruelty is normalized, corruption fattens itself in broad daylight, vulnerable people are hunted by policies designed to break them, and truth is strangled in public.

In this atrocious and hideous moment, our cultural aristocracy assembled beneath chandeliers to celebrate expensive fabric and ornamentation.

Tickets cost $100,000 apiece, and the Gala raised more than $42 million. Who is the beneficiary? Officially, it’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
But the secondary beneficiaries are the luxury brands (massive publicity), celebrity personal brands (image maintenance), media conglomerates (attention harvesting), and billionaire sponsors (reputation laundering via philanthropy).

The Gala is elite self-consecration: art funding channeled into a ritual of status consolidation and an aristocratic greed fest disguised as benevolence.
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I ask the privileged classes these questions: What will you do with your visibility while the world is being decimated? Will you bear witness? Will you resist? Will you leverage your beauty and influence toward justice? Or will you just keep posing?

That’s what sickened me about the Met Gala. Not the extravagance, but the fawning obedience disguised as normalcy. Business as usual is a cowardly political act when the house is on fire.
To proceed as if nothing extraordinary is happening is collaboration with toxic unreality: to twirl, preen, toast, and pose while democratic norms erode and state violence expands. And toxic unreality is the bloodstream of authoritarianism.

Brezsny’s newsletter Delightful Dilemmas post.