The Met Gala Was PEAK Art Nerd Cringe

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]As I was saying before we even got started with this show, I can't pretend to be the target demographic for the Met Gala. I'm a dude. I don't really care a whole ton about fashion. I wear the same shirt in five different colors and and that's about it. But I do understand the importance of art. I do think that art matters in society. I think that you build a positive society through policy for the purpose of also making it beautiful through the concept of art. I think that's important. So, let's talk about the ridiculousness, however, of like I was saying, they're kind of dressed like Batman villains, but let's look at what the whole purpose of the Met Gala is, which is a fundraiser to raise funds for uh for the institute. Uh the theme this year was fashion is art, and it was sponsored by Amazon, which of course caused boycots as as we did talk about >> $10 million.

[00:00:46]>> Exactly. So, this is what it described on the website. It said the gala dress code will be fashion is art, inviting guests to express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and celebrate the countless depictions of the dressed body throughout art history.

[00:01:01]The Met Gala takes place annually on the first Monday in May and the proceeds provide the Costume Institute with its primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and operations. The funds raised also support other museum activities. So there you get the the general idea of what the purpose of the Met Gala is.

[00:01:22]Everybody knows what it is. It's they go up on the stairs. They look a bit ridiculous. So we can go through and look at some of the most ridiculous of the costumes. I'm I'm calling them costumes because that's what they feel like to me. So I'm going to put it on screen here for everybody to see. The first one we have here is from Cardi B.

[00:01:38]I don't know what that is supposed to be.

[00:01:42]>> Can I Can I predict or make you I guess a guess? When I was in Argentina, um, and we spoke a little bit about this before, Lar, there was a food that was more common there than it is here called chinchuline, which is intestine.

[00:01:56]>> This is what she looks like.

[00:01:57]>> It could be.

[00:01:58]>> She looks like what you would put like on a plate, cooked like cooked intestine is what it looks like.

[00:02:03]>> There was um this one from Heidi Cloom.

[00:02:05]Heidi Clume is famous for her Halloween costumes, so I actually appreciate this one. Um, I love that she looks absolutely ridiculous. mainly because she doesn't allow her vanity to get in the way of the Halloween costumes.

[00:02:18]Halloween costume is traditionally in America a place for women. Granted, these days we don't exactly shame women for how they dress anyways. But the archetype was that you could go and dress however you wanted for thing or for Thanksgiving. [laughter] Don't do that for Halloween because, you know, it was one night a year, whatever.

[00:02:34]>> What's that Tik Tok audio? You know, it's the one night a year that a girl can dress like a >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And get away with it. as a as somebody who's a feminine woman, she used it to dress up in things that were not anti-feminine, but were costumes and monsters, and I appreciate the commitment to the bit. Uh, this one from Gwendelyn Christie. She's just carrying a face there, a mask. Can Can you discern what she was trying to say by this?

[00:03:01]>> I don't know what piece of art she was inspired by.

[00:03:05]>> Well, we've got we're going to look at a list later where it kind of gives some more um the less esoteric examples. This has sort of like a Mask of the Red Death feel to me. Maybe they're all going to get in there and >> exchange plagues. And >> Sam Smith >> Oh, that was always dresses badly. You know, he's wor he was a much better dresser when he remembered that he was a man.

[00:03:26]>> No, I was actually it. Yeah.

[00:03:29]I was telling uh Olivia the other night.

[00:03:31]I said Sam Smith is one of those tragic cases where um he did he made fantastic songs that were basically modern pop love ballads which you don't really hear a whole lot of anymore outside of like maybe like an Ed Sheeran or something like that. And he was well-dressed and like he could have done those same songs and been gay and nobody would have care.

[00:03:53]No, but he has used his they they them status as an excuse to get fat and drape himself in velvet and that's pretty much it, you know?

[00:04:01]>> Just own it if you're going to do it.

[00:04:02]>> Like just you can be that guy. I mean, we we did have Liberace. We've had a culture of that. It's okay.

[00:04:08]>> But um >> but no, I I think he looks better in a suit. I think all men look better in suits. I would very much agree.

[00:04:15]>> I don't know what Lena Dunham is doing with this one here. It's red with feathers.

[00:04:19]>> Is that Lena Dunham?

[00:04:20]>> Yes, that's Lena Dunham.

[00:04:21]>> Yep. That is She looks like a different person every time I see her and it's never quite great. You know, I think this is another person who's just so obsessed with themselves >> that they can't like how can she even >> get out of her apartment. She's like her her whole sense of self is so big. She looks so pale, too. Like I don't know if it's the color of the dress, the lighting, cuz the the floor looks kind of, you know, but there's a flash. I mean, you can see there's bruises on her leg. Look, I got bruises on my leg, but I'm not going to a red carpet. I'm just saying when you go to a red carpet like you're usually very cognizant of that.

[00:04:53]You either cover it or you put the you know like the panty hose on to cover it up.

[00:04:58]>> She didn't care. She was like I'm just doing it.

[00:04:59]>> So here is actress Sarah Pollson wearing like $1 bills as a mask I guess to protest like rich people.

[00:05:07]>> Yeah. So she was out there protesting with her $1 bill. And I think she's like >> I hope it's Oh no. She's got Oh, she cheated. She poked holes in so she can see it.

[00:05:15]>> Even worse. But Ali London was posting about this and he said that she's worth $12 million.

[00:05:21]>> And basically what I thought was sort of great was you had all these protesters outside talking about, you know, there's blood in your red carpet, which of course I mean it matches the libout and the car. You can't see it anyway cuz it's red. Doesn't matter.

[00:05:34]>> Um but the protesters and the Met Gala attendees have the same politics.

[00:05:41]>> The only difference is the velvet rope literally >> like what are you protesting? Do you want them to pay more taxes? Jeff Bezos paid like what $2.7 billion dollars in taxes in 2024.

[00:05:51]>> Then you have to tell them like the top.

[00:05:52]>> He's got his like plastic wife now.

[00:05:54]They're all very excited about that, you know. I'm sure that he bought the gala for her.

[00:05:59]>> Oh yeah.

[00:05:59]>> No, they did it in 2012. Like first of all, it was Amazon, [clears throat] not necessarily even just him. And he's not even like in charge of Amazon anymore.

[00:06:07]>> Whatever. He was the one being protested. He was the one whose face was on the little bottles of fake pee.

[00:06:12]Olivia Olivia Rodrigo protested the event, but did do the afterparty and sells and sells like an a record that's unique to just a an Amazon release, which then of course enriches him further because he's got tons of Amazon stuff. And that reminds me actually of uh who in my opinion, you know, I don't know if we're getting into spoilers, but for me, the goat of the Met Gala, Mark Zuckerberg.

[00:06:35]>> Why? Cuz he wasn't there.

[00:06:36]>> No, he was there. Mark Zuckerberg was there with his wife, and it's like, >> was he just in a suit?

[00:06:40]>> She Yeah, he was just in a suit. He was in a tuxedo. Stylish. The watch he had on. Fantastic.

[00:06:44]>> He's worked very hard to like trick people into thinking he's human.

[00:06:48]>> Well, which which is so funny because I think, you know, he he does the opposite of what everybody else in the Macalla does. Everybody else appears as inhuman as possible and [snorts] he tries to appear for him. [laughter] >> Yep.

[00:07:00]>> He's like finally.

[00:07:01]>> So, we had that. Again, Heidi Clume poses as a statue with the theme. I I appreciated that. I did want to know if anybody could explain this one. So, I am going to currently and I'm I want you guys to to maybe bookmark this. I'm gonna eat Crow here because last week we covered uh a video of Olivia Wild. And I said she looked fine. I said she was clearly being filmed on what looked like an iPhone fisheye lens, like somebody had uh, you know, like ratcheted down the angle of the lens all the way into fisheye territory, which automatically makes people look worse through lens distortion.

[00:07:38]>> She looks really, really thin here. Uh, in fact, I got a message from Colonel Curts, friend of the channel, last night. She goes, "What is up with the Ompic face?" And I was like, "Oh, no way."

[00:07:48]>> She did it in a group chat with the two of us, which is very funny. I don't know why she has a group chat with the two of us, but she does. And she'll be she sent it to us and Brett was like right next to me. He goes like just like >> because I said I said she looks fine.

[00:08:00]It's it's just the angle of the lens.

[00:08:02]She's always been very thin but I don't know what this is supposed to be. The best I could hope for is I asked on X last night. I said I'm not an artist so I can't understand the deep complex message that this conveys. I don't know.

[00:08:16]And somebody's answer and I'm going to take them at their word because they seem to I I mean I let's face it I I was >> they said it on the internet. It must be true. Well, I was being sarcastic, but they took me seriously, which I can appreciate. Um, said, "No, I get it. It shows a comparison in beauty standards.

[00:08:30]Modern verse Victorian. Ladies used to wear bustles like this to poof out their long dresses and create curves." So, that's what they're saying the purpose of this was. I mean, it looks like a wicker basket.

[00:08:42]>> Sure. It is kind of I mean, it is a bustle and it's kind of like wearing your underwear over your clothes.

[00:08:47]>> Okay. So, normally it would go under the dress.

[00:08:49]>> That would be under the dress.

[00:08:50]>> That was what was under my wedding dress. That'd be like me putting that over my wedding dress. Basically, I had like a bustle underneath to fluff it out.

[00:08:57]>> Okay.

[00:08:58]>> Yeah.

[00:08:58]>> See, I'm learning so much now, guys. I said >> you didn't even notice. That's kind of the point. You didn't even notice.

[00:09:04]>> But but then the point of putting it on the outside is to what? Like, if they're still doing it today, if it's still going on in wedding dresses today, I guess things haven't changed that much.

[00:09:14]>> Mine needed it because it just needed that bit of like fluff.

[00:09:17]>> Okay.

[00:09:17]>> I'm going to say I I actually don't mind that one. Like I think of all of them, that's probably the only one that maybe does actually call back to some older kind of form of of art and dress. Um and and you have to the opposition of of the white and the black dress. The black dress which standalone would be something that somebody would wear. I don't know if it's MetGala quality. Um, but I I think there's a commentary there that is productive or at least in some way, you know, it's it's not um overly intellectual where, you know, you have some of these other people who are like, well, what are we even doing trying to look ugly?

[00:09:51]>> For me, like on my worst day, I make that tweet that I just made like which is making fun of them. And and I fully admit that on my best day, I can listen to their intellectual answers and say, "I don't get it, but good for you."

[00:10:06]>> Like It makes it harder to do that because celebrities tend to be so pretentious and annoying and and the the people, especially if you look at the uh the lady worth 12 million protesting the 1% makes it harder for me to give that leeway. But I admit that on my best day, I'm like, you know what, as long as you're over there doing your art nerdy nerd stuff, I don't really care because it doesn't affect my life. But also people were protesting a and the whole point was that it was raising money for something that theoretically they find important and if they and if they me and if they if art matters to them as much as they claim they do then sometimes you have to work with people that you don't like like a Jeff Bezos like I was pointing out he said like I would love to hear the politics of the people whose job it is to go out there and court the you know the sponsors like a Jeff Bezos that person can't afford to be picky.

[00:10:56]>> Yeah. And it's and that's the thing is, you know, these very affluent people, they're the ones that sponsor the arts.

[00:11:00]You know, these are your philanthropists. I mean, how else could Hunter Biden have ever realized his goal of becoming an artist?

[00:11:07]>> Well, this of course goes back. I mean, the med the Medici in Italy, they were the sponsors of art. And if you look at portraits, you know, they had their own portraits commissioned. They had all other kinds of things commissioned. The Catholic Church was a sponsor of art.

[00:11:19]That's how you got the Sistine Chapel, you know, which Michelangelo famously did not want to paint. and then he got talked into it. So, I mean, of course, you're like, I didn't even want to do it. [laughter] >> It's like the most beautiful thing in the world. Yeah, it's crazy.

[00:11:33]>> But I I prefer sculpture, honestly. I think. But, uh, >> what did you Okay, I'm going to sidebar then. It's It's my show. I can sidebar.

[00:11:40]What did you What did you think of the Banksy sculpture in London?

[00:11:43]>> I thought it was stupid.

[00:11:44]>> Yeah. Do you Do you think Banksy is a real person? You think it's like a network of people?

[00:11:48]>> Oh, I don't care. I don't think the work is I don't think the work is is that great. And the thing about that piece is you could look at it and you could say, "Oh, he's saying, you know, that ideology can blind a man to what's really important or even to making sure that he's not stepping right off a cliff." But the fact that he put the man on a plinth near uh Churchill near, you know, equestrian statues, >> in London, >> it was in London.

[00:12:14]>> The most surveiled world and it was in a you know, it's in a very public place. But the fact that he put him on a plinth in that area and then put the man in a suit >> shows you that he's not talking about any ideology. He's not criticizing any man who is beholden to an ideology. He's criticizing the British who put up the British flags. He's criticizing the, you know, actual just native English people who are trying to hang on to their country. and he's saying that they are walking off a cliff by not letting themselves be completely Islamified and taken over by, you know, fascist theocracy. So that I thought made it I I think that transformed it from something that was sort of clever and interesting to something that was cheap and propaganda. I >> I like reinterpreting it. I like going, "Whoa, the flag is covering his eyes so that he can walk in faith and he's walking on air. This is crazy." It's like nationalism will allow you to walk on air. You just [laughter] go state that as like as surely as you can to everybody and it and it'll go around.

[00:13:16]It'll become >> that's how that's how I feel talking about Charlie XCX. I'm like yeah I love her. She's pronatalist. Like Charlie's the best anti-contraception. Like let's go. Like >> she we're re in 2026 we are reappropriating every leftwing piece of art or music or anything and making it rightwing.

[00:13:33]>> So this was Rachel Zglers. Now, somebody who knows more about fashion can tell me this designer Prabel Gearing. Guring >> Guring.

[00:13:41]>> Prabal.

[00:13:42]>> Is it Pbal?

[00:13:43]>> The Nazis are making her costume.

[00:13:45]>> Um, the execution of Lady Jane Gray is what she was doing here.

[00:13:49]>> Um, and then of course we have this video. I I'm sorry, but I have to where they were like, "This looks like the most zooted woman in history."

[00:13:56]>> I think she was trying to make like a sexy face and it just didn't.

[00:13:59]>> But she's she's famous for this look.

[00:14:02]Um, I kind of pushed back. I said the drugs would make you grind your teeth, not necessarily do this all the time, but I could be wrong. She could just be trying to smolder and not smoldering, right?

[00:14:13]>> I think she's trying to smolder in a way that I don't know.

[00:14:16]>> She ends up looking like um who is it?

[00:14:18]Um the James Bond parody.

[00:14:21]>> Um >> what's the the guy with the >> Oh, um Austin Powers.

[00:14:24]>> Yeah, she looks like Austin I mean, it's gone now, but she looked like Austin Powers for a second there.

[00:14:28]>> She's uh she's doing her best there. Um, Rachel Zgler is, you know, it's hard to pick on her still. It's I I tried to lay off as as much as I can, but she's at least like it says it says Lady Jane Gray, but these were some of the other ones that were there. So, Hunter Schaefer is in Prada inspired by is it Maida Prim Primovi?

[00:14:48]>> I don't know, but um MTV said prettiest girl there or something like that.

[00:14:52]>> Love that.

[00:14:53]>> Great.

[00:14:54]>> Um, inaccurate, but okay.

[00:14:56]>> Emma uh Emma Cham Chamberlain in Muggler. I I thought I saw Mergler in the chat. Muggler and Mergler are not the same person. Isn't it M Mugler?

[00:15:06]>> Maybe who know Emma Chamberlain is still around.

[00:15:09]>> She and she so different. She's a YouTuber.

[00:15:12]>> Um she was a YouTuber and I think back in the day she was kind of just like a cute, you know, lifestyle girl and now she looks completely different. Yeah.

[00:15:21]She like looks like, you know, basically like those videos of people that are like beginning of college, after college, and they got totally like liified. That's what happened to her.

[00:15:31]She used to just be a very like I didn't watch her a lot, but she's kind of like a YouTuber and a very, you know, kind of cute, fun, easygoing, and >> she looks like Seus or not See, she looks like Voldemort >> a little bit. Like that.

[00:15:45]>> Yeah. It's like the lighting on her nose in one of these photos I'm looking at, it's it appears like it's not there.

[00:15:50]It's just the nostrils. She literally looks like Voldemort.

[00:15:53]>> Yep.

[00:15:53]>> Sabrina Carpenter was wearing a dress made up of the film print of the movie Sabrina.

[00:15:58]>> That's kind of kind of cool. I like that's cool at the very least. Very clever.

[00:16:03]>> Even her nails had like film like theme and I was like that that's good.

[00:16:06]Attention to detail.

[00:16:07]>> I really don't like Sabrina Carpenter, but that's actually good.

[00:16:11]>> I bobbed to her music, but I can't stand her as a person.

[00:16:14]>> I I almost prefer her as a person than her music >> really. So [laughter] then um somebody got mad. Emily Zenady got mad and said she's interpreting a This is back about Rachel Zaggler now. She's interpreting a famous painting of the execution of Lady Jane Gray. You uncultured swine.

[00:16:31]>> It's unfair to pigs.

[00:16:32]>> I actually I liked that one.

[00:16:34]>> You like that one?

[00:16:34]>> Yeah.

[00:16:35]>> Okay.

[00:16:35]>> I I don't think it's that bad, but the Habsburg [laughter] the Habsburg reference at the bottom there.

[00:16:40]>> The faces she was making.

[00:16:42]>> So he said the facial expression definitely are an interpretation. Thanks for sharing the reference. Um, yeah. So, there it is. Like I said, I fully admit that this is uh often times we kind of run into our own troubles by going to places we don't understand and then criticizing them. Um, I'm more or less kind of just captivated by it being a world that I don't really get.

[00:17:04]>> Uh, but at the same time, like I feel like I get into the arguments with conservatives all the time when they when they talk about movies being just, you know, actors are just people playing pretend. And I said, I think that's a straw man. I think that acting is a form of art.

[00:17:18]>> What you have to always wrestle with is like when it stoops to or when it becomes too pretentious when it like relies too much like it's too auto referential and it's you know it just gets to the point where you're not even trying to reflect anything beautiful anything important. Um you're just trying to upset people. You're just trying to be regressive.

[00:17:36]>> And I think we we like the left falls into that way too much into the the regressive kind of part of that. And of course, we we'll finish it off on this because somebody said that they reached the end of the >> we've reached peak like oppression Olympics.

[00:17:51]>> We've really gotten there.

[00:17:52]>> Yeah, this was sort of amazing. This sentence was crazy.

[00:17:54]>> Aaron Rose Phillip, the first black transgender woman with quadripolgic cereble palsy signed to a major modeling agency arriving at the Met Gala. What's kind of weird is what is what is he going to be modeling and for who I >> how many people are there with cerebral palsy who are going to be >> who are millionaires [laughter] >> yeah buying like really expensive clothing and how I I thought the purpose of modeling and you could ask fashion designers they use fit models you know to like figure out the sizes and whatever >> modeling is supposed to show you how it might look on you >> I thought the point was okay so maybe maybe I was misinterpreted when somebody told me this I thought they said the point when they used to skinny models was that it was basically like a clothes hanger.

[00:18:40]>> A clothes hanger. Sure. But the idea is you're supposed to see how the clothes look. You're you you can't even tell what he's wearing in this.

[00:18:47]>> Is this a dress? Is it some sort of like schmata like my grandmother would say?

[00:18:51]Like what is this? What is going on? I don't know. I love >> I don't get it.

[00:18:55]>> I love one of the tweets I just read.

[00:18:57]It's Aaron Rose Phillip. First black transgender woman with quadripollegic cerebral palsy. Why did they use first though? Are people really thinking?

[00:19:05]Thank goodness the road is now paved for the second black trans.

[00:19:08]>> Yeah, [laughter] that that is important.

[00:19:09]>> I I had a tweet about that earlier >> with quadripolgic cerebral palsy. And look, I have a cousin with pretty severe cerebral palsy and I >> this can't be made for him. [laughter] What would that be doing? Like I honestly there's no way my aunt uncle would be like, "Yeah, >> let's go." No, there's other ways to portray it.

[00:19:27]>> The other thing, too, is it's like you're not trans.

[00:19:30]>> You're just you're not trans. You're just having a hard time in a lot of other ways, >> but you're not a girl. You don't You probably don't need estrogen. You probably don't need more surgeries.

[00:19:39]>> It's the last thing you need.

[00:19:39]>> Yeah. It's like been enough already with the medical situation.

[00:19:43]>> Well, that's when you're playing bingo and you you get a bingo, but you're going for blackout. You like [laughter] you want to hit every single dot.

[00:19:50]>> You got to do it. Yeah. It reminds me of that old dead Milkman song about the lesbian albino midgeted Eskimos.

[00:19:55]>> Yeah.

[00:19:56]>> I think Lauren Chen tweeted like, "Jesus, pick a struggle."

[00:19:59]>> Oh, yeah. It was like I clicked on the tweet and it was like 6 seconds ago she had responded and she was like pick a struggle dude and I was like >> it's just it's uh and nobody's trying to be rude when they say that it feels like you're being put up as spectacle for >> but you'll notice this this man in the chair. He's not the one who was tweeting this. It's everybody else saying this about him. So to top it off, he's being objectifized by the leftist gays, you know.

[00:20:23]>> And I guess my point was at the end of the the night I I tweeted this today.

[00:20:28]Uh, there was this photo from a Met Gala bathroom selfie. Somebody pointed out that Blackpink is in there, the four members of Blackpink. Otherwise, I said, "The death of monoculture says, who the hell are these people?"

[00:20:39]>> Yeah.

[00:20:39]>> Like, it's like the the the famous Bradley Cooper photo that everybody remembers from the Oscars years ago is the last time that it really felt like there was a monoculture where everybody kind of understood and was living in the same world. We don't live in the same world as our neighbors anymore. And I'm not even talking about in the political sense, which is where that usually falls in, which is the discussion of like you depending on where you get your news from, you live in a completely different world from your from your liberal neighbor.

[00:21:05]>> That's not even true of like necessarily just your politics anymore. Like now, uh, culture has been so subculturified if if for a lack of a better phrase.

[00:21:15]>> I think that would be good.

[00:21:16]>> Like that everybody's kind of whittleled down into their own tiny little subset and nothing like there's nothing for people to coales around.

[00:21:22]>> Yeah. People will mention like I've talked to some buddies recently and they're like yeah I've been playing this video game and I'm like >> which yeah like you've been playing this this game where it's like this super super niche like co-op gameplay. I'm like you know I miss the I miss the times when we would be like what are you playing? Oh everybody in the world is playing Minecraft or everybody in the world is buying the new Call of Duty game.

[00:21:45]>> Thanks for watching. Listen to full episodes of Pop Culture Crisis on Spotify. Keep up with us on social media and make sure you subscribe and ring that bell so you [music] never miss the show. Bye, guys.