The 2024 Met Gala fund-raiser used a JG Ballard story for its theme, The Garden of Time.
Ballard is one of my favourite writers, especially his short stories and science fiction. Several have made wonderful films.
Art and commerce lurk in the conversation about the latest Met Gala.
Ballard’s story reads as a symbolist piece about the nature of beauty itself with undertones of something darker in the way it portrays the different classes we encounter in the story. I wonder whether they really looked closely at the implications of employing Ballard’s text this way.
Does beauty belong to the upper classes, and something only the wealthy can understand or appreciate? Ballard’s story shows an isolated sanctuary of fading beauty beset by an enormous crowd preparing to overrun and destroy the space. As Ballard’s Count Axel walks in his garden, looking out from a place of wealth and beauty, a huge disorderly army approaches from the distance. He plucks time flowers to reverse time, temporarily slowing the advance of the vast throng. But the time flowers are becoming scarce, the horde getting ever closer.
Ballard calls them a rabble.
You can see for yourself by clicking here to read The Garden of Time.
I understand the annual Met Galas to be a fund-raising exercise, a fascinating intersection of art, fashion and popular culture, but having re-read the story I am disturbed by the implications of juxtaposing this story and the Gala.
When I first read the Ballard story back in the 1970s, I hadn’t yet encountered the long symbolist play Axël by the Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, composed roughly between 1870 & the author’s death in 1890), a work I read as part of my research into Claude Debussy, Maurice Maeterlinck and the symbolist movement.
You can read Axël here.
No they’re not the same story but I am certain that Ballard uses the name as a deliberate reference to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s hero, a symbolist evocation of time and the decay of culture. Axël is a long sad story of a Byronic hero looking for spiritual enlightenment, ultimately taking a pathway similar to Tristan, as he drinks poison with his beloved. The most famous quote I found online (having read the play more than 20 years ago):
“Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous” (“Living? Our servants will do that for us“).
The symbolist ideal is very much an elusive search that makes no claim to be democratic or socialist, but rather leans more in the direction of elitism if not a genuine contempt for the masses. And no I don’t share such views. They creep me out whether they’re in the mouth of the poet or a devout follower such as Claude Debussy, Stéphane Mallarmé or Richard Wagner.
Debussy attempted to set Axël to music in his youth, although I don’t believe more than a fragment of a piano-vocal score has been found, composed in 1888 according to catalogues of Debussy’s works.
Speaking of time, the 19th century Axël takes a very long time to reach a conclusion that Ballard accomplishes with breath-taking swiftness.
In the story a tiny stronghold of beauty is under attack by a destructive rabble, as though beauty itself belongs only to the wealthy few, while the hordes are insensible to beauty.
At a time of runaway real estate prices, inflation, and huge wealth discrepancies, it seems astonishingly tone deaf of the organizers to choose Ballard’s imagery for their theme. Why am I surprised? Silly me.