Social media, social classes & the Met Gala
What is the intersection between JG Ballard's prophetic visions and an opulent celebrity do? Beats me.
I have known of JG Ballard only on the fringes of his work (and the fringes of my awareness). Presumably he was on my radar at all because he wrote science fiction (amongst other things), and he was a bit of a futurist. There was a period some years ago, when his prescient comments about society & technology were floating about the internet (I link to some ahead). A couple of extracts stand out more for our times, one describes us all as being creators, the other, in a way was predicting social media:
"Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day."
JG Ballard came up again because of the Met Gala. Now, I would hardly be the one to be excited or drawn to a large gathering of celebrities and slightly well-to-do folk wearing fancy clothes. But this year’s Met Gala theme was picked from a short story by Ballard, called The Garden Of Time. Creation and decay in living things is the grander metaphor, presumably; or “humanity's tendency towards cycles of creation and destruction”.
In another display of derived understanding on my part, this is a story I have vaguely read about, but not read. I knew it is known for being a dystopian tale of the super rich ensconced in a castle of splendour, while the common masses are rioting. Seems like an odd pick for a high society extravaganza?
This quite lovely piece on the BBC does a much better job of capturing this dissonance.
(its jarring) …in the context of an event that is a celebration of affluence, excess and rarefied beauty, where a table for the evening sells for $300,000, and an invite bestows an exclusive glitter of Vogue-approved importance on the attendee; perhaps acutely so, when set against the backdrop of global volatility and economic uncertainty, the divisions between safety and danger, wealth and poverty feeling ever starker. Under those circumstances, what on Earth are we to make of this theme based on a story that, regardless of where its loyalties lie, features the destruction of high culture by an undifferentiated mass of humanity? In its evocation of beauty on the brink of ruin, who does it disdain?
More on his social media take here, and other predictions from Ballard here.