The red Chanel dress that Nicole Kidman wore to this year’s Met Gala took a team of artisans 800 hours to make. It took about eight seconds for a chorus of critics to line up and decry the entire evening as obscene.
I see things differently.
Make no mistake: Jeff Bezos buying his way into fashion’s biggest night is a particular kind of provocation right now. It comes on the heels of his Venice wedding. His wife’s 10-minute joyride to space. All this while ordinary people are watching their grocery bills rise faster than their paycheques. The protests that sprung up in New York to draw attention to the gap between Bezos’s lifestyle and the lives of his Amazon employees were compelling.
But the case against the Met Gala — and against the broader culture of big-money philanthropy it stands for — collapses the moment you examine it seriously.
This is not abstract for me. I am alive because of philanthropy. The treatments that helped me to beat cancer were funded, in meaningful part, by people whose cheques cleared long before I needed them. So, when the same impulse that equips a cancer ward with the latest technology gets dismissed as vanity because some of it shows up on a red carpet, I take it personally.
We do not get to celebrate the philanthropy that feels noble and mock the philanthropy that feels frivolous. Same world. Same donors. The same impulse to put a name on something that lasts.
We like to imagine that art transcends money. It doesn’t. It just depends on it quietly.
The Met Gala runs on the model that built the Sistine Chapel. The Medici, the Sforzas, a string of popes — wealthy families and powerful institutions paid artists to make beautiful things in exchange for prestige and the cultural immortality of a name on a masterpiece. Botticelli had a sponsor. Leonardo had a sponsor. Michelangelo had a very demanding sponsor with a chapel ceiling to fill.
It’s worth noting the critics of those patrons said precisely what the critics of the Met Gala say now: What vanity! What excess!
Five centuries on, Bezos ponies up a reported $10 million (U.S.) to sponsor the Met Gala. The Costume Institute has a record-breaking night. And then a world-class exhibit opens that more than a million people will visit. (The same cannot be said of his superyacht.)
The alternative here isn’t a more just world. It’s a less beautiful one. Because the gowns at the Met Gala are art. Wearable sculpture. The snobbery cuts both ways — painting gets reverence, fashion gets eye-rolls — even though fashion is the most democratic art form we have. It touches every life and encodes every culture. The Met Gala is, every year, an argument that fashion belongs in the same conversation as Botticelli. And it is the visible end of a culture of private giving that steps in when the public purse is empty.
In my role as the Chancellor of OCAD University, I see firsthand that our cultural institutions are operating in a far harder environment than a generation ago. Endowments are smaller. Operating grants are flat or shrinking in real terms. And government, at every level, is wrestling with socio-economic pressures and growing uncertainty. If we want our cultural institutions to keep their doors open and their collections growing, we need more wealthy Canadians showing up, not fewer. We need them on boards. We need them at galas. We need their names on hospital wings, and scholarships, and research labs.
Some Canadians may find this a tough pill to swallow. This country has never made up its mind about the wealthy. We are uncomfortable with their existence and uncomfortable with their absence. We tax their toys, we lecture them at budget time, and then we are quietly relieved when they cover the gap between what our public institutions need and what our public budgets are willing to provide.
Philanthropy is not a betrayal of the public good. It is how the public good gets built when the public purse is stretched.
Spectacle, properly directed, is one of the oldest tools we have for funding the things worth keeping.
Use it. Don’t sneer at it.
