In February, the Met revealed Ballard’s “The Garden of Time” as the theme for tonight’s red carpet.
In the “Garden of Time,” Count Axel and his wife live in a grand villa with a sprawling walled estate. A crystalline meadow of glass-like “time flowers” spring out across the plot, while over the horizon, a whip-yielding angry mob inches closer and closer. Everyday Axel picks the head of a time flower, winding back the hours and reversing the mob’s advancement, until all the blooms are finished — an inevitability that looms large over the story’s few pages.
Since the 1950s, the British author — who died in 2009 — built an oeuvre centered almost exclusively on dystopian catastrophe. Whether the scene is a luxury high-rise apartment complex or an affluent gated community in the south of France, Ballard’s thesis remains the same: The glittering sheen of upper-middle class life is nothing but a thin veneer, seconds away from cracking.
Even if you don’t recognize his name, you are likely to have come across Ballard’s unnerving musings on human psychology. Steven Spielberg’s 1987 film “Empire of the Sun” is based on Ballard’s 1984 novel of the same name, for example, as was David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of the writer’s 1974 work “Crash,” which follows a group of people sexually aroused by auto collisions. But it’s not just film — Ballard’s worldview has infiltrated art, music, architecture and fashion, perhaps more consistently than any other 20th-century author.
Click through to learn more about Ballard, and the creatives his work inspired.
Sumber: www.cnn.com
