WEEKLY Dose of Art

Every year, the Met Gala happens. Celebrities walk up some famous steps in New York wearing extremely expensive outfits. The internet goes crazy for 24 hours. 

But this year was different.

The theme was "Costume Art." And the people who showed up took it seriously. Like, really seriously.

What happened on that red carpet was painting, sculpture, performance art, and art history all showing up at the same party at the same time.

Artist spotlight of the week

First, what even is the Met Gala?

Quick context before we get into it.

The Met Gala is a fundraising event held every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It raises money for the museum's Costume Institute, which is basically the department that studies and preserves fashion history. 

Every year, there's a theme, and guests are expected to dress according to that theme.

When fashion stopped being just clothing

For most of fashion history, clothes were about covering the body.

Then, making a body look good. 

Then, making a body look expensive. 

But at some point, designers started treating the human body itself as the raw material. The person wearing the outfit wasn't modeling the art. They were becoming the art.

Marina Abramović would probably call this performance art

Okay, quick detour. Who is Marina Abramović?

Marina Abramović is a Serbian artist born in 1946, considered the grandmother of performance art. Performance art is a type of art where the artwork isn't a painting or a sculpture. It's a live act. The artist's body is the medium. The audience watching is part of the experience.

Now think about the Met Gala red carpet. There's a stage. There's an audience. There are cameras everywhere. Celebrities walk up in conceptual costumes, hold poses, and perform for the public gaze.

That's not so different from performance art anymore. The carpet is the stage. The cameras are the audience. The celebrities are the performers. The outfits are the conceptual props.

This year, the Met Gala drifted very close to Abramović territory. And most people watching had no idea.

The most art-literate looks of the night

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter who lived from 1862 to 1918. He's famous for his incredibly decorative, gold-covered paintings of women. 

One of his paintings is called Mäda Primavesi, painted in 1912. It shows a nine-year-old girl in a white ruffled dress, standing straight, staring directly at you.

Hunter Schafer wore a dress inspired by this painting. Same empire waist, rosettes, bow in her hair, same pink cheeks and blue eyeshadow. She looked like the painting had grown up, walked out of the museum, and onto the carpet. 

Her skirt had been shredded into tatters at the bottom, like the painting had aged and deteriorated over the century since it was made.

Also inspired by Klimt, specifically his Golden Period. This is the phase of his career when Klimt covered everything in actual gold leaf, turning his subjects into something that looked less like a person and more like a Byzantine mosaic or a religious icon. 

Gracie Abrams wore a gilded Chanel dress dripping in gold embroidery and chains. That's very Klimt.

Most people at the Met Gala reference famous male painters. Leonardo, Klimt, Van Gogh. Madonna didn't.

Leonora Carrington was a British-Mexican surrealist painter who lived from 1917 to 2011. She painted strange, dreamlike worlds full of mythological creatures, occult imagery, and feminine power. She's less famous than Dalí or Magritte but arguably more interesting.

Madonna arrived in a Saint Laurent look directly referencing Carrington's painting The Temptation of St. Anthony. 

Seven women walked behind her carrying enormous lengths of fabric like a ritual procession. It felt like something Abramović might have staged.

In 1884, the painter John Singer Sargent exhibited a portrait of a young socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. He called it Madame X. The painting showed her in a black dress with one strap fallen off her shoulder.

Paris was scandalized. Absolutely outraged. The fallen strap was considered so indecent that Sargent repainted it back into place. The original version disappeared.

This year at the Met Gala, four different celebrities, including Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Julianne Moore, arrived in their own versions of the Madame X look - fallen strap and all.

What scandalized Paris in 1884 became a red carpet reference in 2026. Fashion still recreates the same scandal cycles, just with better PR.

Becoming the sculpture

Heidi Klum arrived covered in latex and foam prosthetics sculpted to look exactly like white marble.

Klum's makeup recreated that illusion on a living human body. She was a museum object that had briefly become human.

It was a live contemporary art exhibition with a celebrity guest list.

Every May, avant-garde art briefly becomes mainstream

Every year, people watch the Met Gala and say the looks are too weird, too much, too strange. Meanwhile, art historians are sitting there recognizing surrealism, body art, conceptual performance, and living sculpture all in the same two-hour window.

Social media accidentally turns into an art criticism forum for 24 hours. 

The Met Gala still calls itself a fashion event. But in 2026, it looked a lot closer to a museum that had come alive for one night.

This Week in Art