#wastefulness

This fall, we’re taking a look at how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have promoted civic engagement through their work.

Inspired by current events in 18th-century British politics, William Hogarth created a series of prints satirizing the spectacle of election campaigns. Set in the fictional country town of ‘Guzzledown,’ Hogarth depicts four stages of an election, each of which is filled with acts of bribery, mayhem, wastefulness, corruption, and deceit; in short, a catalogue of behaviors and traits associated with winning by any means and at all costs. While we may not recognize all the specific references from the period, Hogarth’s witty and scathing take on the craziness that can surround the democratic process is still relatable today. 

You can stop wanting to keep something once you attach it to a trauma.

These are nice dresses. They were.

The black one on the left is the dress that I wore out to dinner the night that Hugo ambushed me with the news that he wanted a divorce. Two days before my birthday, over a week before Christmas, ten minutes before we entered a Christmas party for his coworkers that I didn’t even want to go to. I did my hair, put on lipstick, and wore high heels. I put on the black dress because it didn’t make me look fat.

The blue dress on the left is the one that I bought for a date night that Hugo took me out on a few weeks after he had his nissen fundoplication surgery and hernia repair. That date was one of the last ones he took me on, right after he broke up with his PREVIOUS mistress, supposedly with the promise that he “was going to devote my time to my relationship with my wife from now on.” He took me to a casino for a comedy show in Oroville. I don’t even remember who we saw that night. We met our friends, another married couple we’ve known over twenty years. When we ate dinner, Hugo had to excuse himself to go throw up. He wasn’t recovered enough from the surgery yet. Apparently, he couldn’t stomach his own decision to be faithful.

I’ve almost given away these same dresses on multiple occasions. You do the thing. You keep things because they are expensive, or an occasion might come up where you need them.

These were taking up space. The black dress keeps bringing back the visceral memory of my broccoli that was undercooked and how much my shoes pinched my feet and how fucking bored and angry I was all night listening to the guest speakers give a slide show after they served the entree.

I’m just so glad I don’t have to go to another Christmas party for work, or to another smoky casino and wait an hour to eat dinner while I’m starving. I don’t have to climb into bed with a man and who is fantasizing about other women and texting them first thing in the morning when we wake up. I don’t have to see his face across the table or smell the pong of his cologne. Or his gas.

“We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.” 

― Anthon St. Maarten