Philanthropy in the Age of Fascism

What’s that smell? Did someone forget to take out the trash? Are your concierge medical peptides leaving a sulfurous taste in your mouth? Are you sure you know where you are? Is that a bottle of urine hidden behind the medieval suit of armor? Is this the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or am I lost in a dream of a crumbling empire?

The repulsive spectacle of the Met Gala happened this week, and it is apparent to anyone whose soul is still intact that the Met Gala has just jumped a dead, stinking microplastic-choked shark. The grotesque displays of vulgarity have overwhelmed any of the camp fun the event was once known for. Do the so-called celebrities who attended in their unironic costumes understand their own fall from A list to a gentleman’s C-minus? If they had gone to college, they might understand what that means.

As someone who has been involved in nonprofit education and arts organizations my whole life, I empathize with anyone who has to raise money for a cultural institution trying to make it in the United States; without state support for the arts, organizations have to beg. Money is dirty, and people have long tried to launder their souls by giving their filthy lucre to charity. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an estimated annual operating cost of $427 million dollars, which means it needs to raise over a $100 million each year. Last year the Met Gala brought in $31 million, and this year it saw a record $41 million raised.

Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren contributed an estimated $10 million to $20 million to make themselves feel like human beings again by buying the honorific of Gala Hosts. Given the Bezos’s net worth, they would have to contribute an annual $10 million dollars for the next 2,700 years before they gave it all away. By this account, the Metropolitan Museum sold itself cheap.

Meanwhile, at your local Amazon warehouse, delivery drivers who routinely work fourteen-hour shifts, have been forced to urinate in bottles, as they have been denied bathroom breaks. Prior to the Met Gala, activists planted dozens of bottles of “urine” in the Metropolitan Museum in protest of the museum’s courting of Amazon creator Bezos’s sponsorship of the Gala.

The Bezos’s could easily fund the Metropolitan Museum of Art in perpetuity by giving it a tiny fraction of their wealth. They could also quietly give the museum an annual $20 million and not even notice it. Instead, they throw a party and put themselves at the center of it, submitting their ghoulish plastic surgeries to the scrutiny of the press, parading their spiritual and physical ugliness for all to see, and using a cultural institution of great depth and importance as a rented public relations tool. Extreme wealth like theirs creates monsters. Billionaires are not only destroying our democracy, they are trying to force us to see them as agents of goodness and charity. Nobody is fooled. Jeff Bezos, there’s a bottle of urine with your name on it.