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In Paris, Punk’s Curatorial Redemption

PARIS — Unlike the widely ridiculed Costume Institute show PUNK: Chaos to Couture, a show that examined punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the 1970s through its enduring influence today, Europunk: An artistic revolution, recently closed at Cité de la Musique, was rigorously periodic (ending in 1980) and broader in range.

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Getting Punked: Protesting the Met’s Decadent Appropriation

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has forgotten that clothes and fashion are not art. When you go to see the PUNK: Chaos to Couture exhibit, which opened on May 9 and runs until August 14, you may think you stumbled instead into a luxury couturier’s boutique. The outré fashions are fabulous and gorgeously displayed and there’s some badass soundtrack music by Jayne County, Suicide, and the Sex Pistols, but you can’t try on any of the clothing and in the end, you are only permitted to buy over-priced T-shirts in the gift shop. Dude, I see the couture, but where the hell is the CHAOS?

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God Save the Met and Their Fuckin’ Costume Institute

If there is but one cornerstone of “Punk” as fashion, it is what Dame Vivienne Westwood dubbed “confrontation dressing.” Swastikas, tampons, spray-painted swears, safety pins — these were the tools with which this particular postmodern machine of resistance, youth, and style were forged. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring costume exhibition, Punk: From Chaos to Couture, hovered over the essence of this defensive dress, but skirted the issues of subculture to champion superficial style.

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Watch Out! Punk Is History at the New Museum

Sitting in the New Museum theater last Thursday night with an audience full of old-school punk and avant-garde musicians and artists such as Alan W. Moore, Coleen Fitzgibbon and Becky Howland, who were all a part of Collaborative Projects, the artist collective that founded ABC No Rio and organized the Times Square Show, I witnessed a generation of New York art and culture defining their own historical importance.