Right Shoes, Wrong Opening

L.A. Times columnist Booth Moore assessing the Met's "Punk: Chaos to Couture" Gala fiasco:

"All of it got me thinking about an interview I did with Vivienne Westwood, who with Malcolm MacLaren believed they could wage a social war through fashion with their shop Sex on Kings Road in London in the 1970s. But ultimately, even they gave up. 'Punk was a heroic attempt at confronting the establishment,' she told me. 'But ultimately it failed.' To explain why, Westwood paraphrased her manager, Carlo D'Amario, who said, 'The establishment is a car going 100 miles an hour. You can throw blips at it and try to stop it, but you won't bring it to a halt. It will only go faster with your energy.'"

Relatedly, gallerist Gavin Brown interviewed at Style.com on the Gala's concurrence with the big art-market event of the week:

"The fashion crowd doesn’t get anything right about art. The two tribes speak two entirely different languages. You are either on one side or the other. This is a particularly interesting week to think about the difference: the punk Met Ball and Frieze Art Fair. Both sides using the other to dress themselves up as something they are not, and destroying something essential about themselves in the process. The punk Met Ball was particularly hideous. The final enslavement of one of the most powerful postwar social movements. Reduced to Sarah Jessica Parker's fauxhawk. A sad and accurate diagram of the state of our culture. A crowd of shiny morons turning reality inside out so it matches the echo chamber of their worldview. Would Sid have been invited? What would he have thought? Is this what Mark Perry meant by 'This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band'? The English art schools of the sixties and seventies — the cradle of this creative movement — must be writhing in their supply-side straightjackets. It only emphasizes to me that fashion — whatever that is — sees art (and artists) as an idiot-savant gimp, and they keep them on a leash, begging for glam snacks. And fashion follows along behind art, picking up its golden shit."