The Year in Review: The Bad Dream of American Succession

In early summer of 2024, when Joseph Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, and 20-year-old Thomas Crooks had not yet fired on Donald Trump from a roof in rural Pennsylvania, I went to see an art show. I’d had a difficult spring, involving chronic pain from a birth injury and a ten-hour commute to a teaching job that had quickly become a source of ambivalence. I wasn’t feeling great, in other words. I went to the exhibition in hope of altering my mood.

Those of you who saw this show will laugh – or perhaps gnash your teeth – when I tell you that I was going to see ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. I put on my most comfortable pants and left the house.

‘Sleeping Beauties’ was, of course, tied to last spring’s Met Gala, ‘The Garden of Time’. That evening’s parade of bedazzled floral travesties was purportedly inspired by J.G. Ballard’s eponymous 1962 short story – probably a cynical ‘evocation of beauty on the brink of ruin’, as Rosalind Jana wrote in her review for the BBC. Thing is, I’m not sure Ballard’s tale is exactly or uniquely critical of the two aristocrats who morph into statues as freaky peasants overrun their private park. Count Axel’s austere time-flower garden, with its Bach soundtrack and erudite sensuality, has little meaning for the unreflective, cart-dragging ‘mob’; meanwhile, count and countess would rather die than help anyone. For reasons I do not entirely understand, certain administrators of New York society decided to reverse-engineer this parable of apocalyptic class war for their party theme. 

Nevertheless, I was determined to make use of the semi-public space and didactic art-offering for which the party was designed to raise money. I made my foray first thing. Digital queues are a common crowd-control device at the Met, so I dutifully logged on and, after receiving a text alert, joined an IRL line of about 30 people, and was eventually prodded into a narrow passageway between glass cases containing clothing and accessories. The sensation of moving in this space was almost identical to that of standing in line outside: the way was so constricted that people shuffled, apparently too baffled even to record the experience for social media. There were no immediately visible exits, and it was impossible to advance without shoving past individuals in front of you. I reflected that this would be an ironic way to go: my body pulped before fragile antique gowns. Someone farted. I began to hope for a fire alarm. 

I should explain that the central point of this spectacle – which was now causing me to reflect on the conditions that led to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy in which 146 garment workers died – was radical engagement of the senses. The visitor was meant to sniff hats, rub walls, hear the rustling of bygone skirts. ‘Artificial intelligence’ had been deployed; it was complicated. I respect enormously the concentration and care that go into curatorial practice. But ‘Sleeping Beauties’, for all its prettiness and strategy, mostly gave off vibes of bad faith and self-congratulation. If the goal was to provide access to hidden reaches of the Costume Institute, this access was mainly messaging – a story told on YouTube. In person, you felt herded, your sensorium shut down in an act of self-preservation, even as various affordances intended to animate the couture came off as creepy stuff put together by a less effective P.T. Barnum.

The show spoke less to the magic of fashion than to the ways in which institutional generosity has been warped by investment in specious technologies. It also demonstrated a lack of regard for the human beings who make up publics.

Recall the story of Sleeping Beauty. Sure, it’s about hibernation, but it’s mostly about the violence of succession and contains a euphemistic assassination attempt. Sleeping Beauty, rightful royal, is cursed by a malevolent fairy. She is not killed. Her reign is delayed by a century of sleep. (In the earliest extant French version, Beauty is raped by her prince while she is incapacitated, and it is the child they conceive who wakes her.) Much as in the Ballard tale, an unstable allegory is at work. Sleeping Beauty is about what can happen after a failure of leadership. This doesn’t appear to be anything nice.

One of my favourite pieces of poetry is a formulation of Hamlet’s that’s also quoted in one of my favourite movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams,’ the dysfunctional prince reflects. As we careen mournfully back, under Trump’s forthcoming leadership, to the unfinished business of the 1980s, a time of trickle-down economics and health crises, I have a message for the Sleeping Beauties of New York (for they are the only Sleeping Beauties a plebe like me can hope to know): Wake up. Future generations will analyze your actions with forensic zeal. You will be remembered for what you did – and for what you didn’t do.

^{Main image: A dress is displayed during a press preview of the Met Costume Institute's spring 2024 exhibition ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’, 2024. Courtesy and photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images}