Griping about the obscenity of the Met Gala celebration of conspicuous extravagance is a tradition as old as the Met Gala itself; one could say that hating the Met Gala is the central ritual of the Met Gala; it's not a bug or even a feature — it's the logline.

But even by that standard of willful despicability, there was something uniquely grotesque in this year's display; something suggestive of the larger sense that the media elite world as we knew it is sliding