Would-be Met Gala exhibition opened last week after six-month closure.

Although the Met Gala itself was cancelled entirely due to COVID-19, the exhibition that would have served as the theme to the event opened last Wednesday and will run through February 7th, 2021. Entitled About Time: Fashion and Duration, the exhibition is a production of the Met’s Costume Institute, and displays the trajectory of fashion trends from 1870 through the present cultural moment. Taking as its conceptual model French philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of duration—that is, the simultaneous co-existence of the past with the present—the display juxtaposes clothing articles from historically disparate time periods in order to highlight their commonalities and thereby unite them.

In order to comply with health and safety guidelines due to COVID-19, which stipulate that the Museum operates at no greater than 25% of its occupancy capacity, all exhibition tickets are for timed-entry, with new rounds of tickets being released every two weeks. Mondays are reserved for Met Members, though Members, along with whoever else might otherwise satisfy the conditions for free entry, must still reserve free timed-entry tickets online.

Billboard portraying the murder of George Floyd displayed in Times Square.

Last Tuesday, a billboard of Donald Perlis’s painting “FLOYD” rendered with a Dalai Lama quote (“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”) went up in Times Square. The 26-by-24-foot billboard is displayed on Seventh Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets, and is the work of the George Floyd Justice Billboard Committee, who raised the funds for it via GoFundMe and intends to continue placing billboards all over the country. The Committee consists of artists and other professionals from New York’s art industry, and is conducting this project as “a plea to look inward at injustice and equality in the world”, and “an effort to keep this focus front and center in our collective conscience.”

Radio Free Brooklyn’s ‘Wall of Lies’ resurrected in Soho after vandalization in original Bushwick spot

The ‘Wall of Lies’—a huge, multicolored mosaic mural consisting of over twenty thousand falsehoods proclaimed by President Trump—was unveiled on Saturday October 24th in its new Manhattan location on the northwest corner of the intersection of Lafayette and Grand Streets. The display, organized and executed by Radio Free Brooklyn, originally appeared in Bushwick in early October, but was vandalized with white supremacist language (“Vote Trump or Die”, and “Stand Back and Stand By”, for example) a week after its initial unveiling. In response, Radio Free Brooklyn launched a successful fundraising campaign to subsidize the resurrection of the installation, which was rendered at double its original size. Each tile of the mosaic is color-coded to correspond to a specific topic (green tiles, for example, contain lies about coronavirus, while sky blue indicates lies about immigration, and so on), and the piece will remain on display through Election Day.

A digital version of the ‘Wall of Lies’ can be viewed here.