Consider Ursula K. Le Guin's vision of utopia in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but imagine this version: Hollywoodupia.
You are an artist, a technology entrepreneur, a billionaire or perhaps an influencer. You learn the rules, find your place and get the chance to survive. Actually, more than survive: to live in abundance. But what happens if you cross a line you never should have? Who decides whether you can stay? And what happens to everything you created while you belonged?
In Le Guin’s Omelas, a city’s happiness depends on the suffering of a single child. Its citizens know. Most accept the arrangement; some walk away. The story unsettles the reader by asking what makes a beautiful world possible, and what its inhabitants are willing to accept to preserve it.
Hollywoodupia has its own arrangements between beauty, wealth and belonging. To understand them, it is worth looking at the moment a cultural institution changes its mind.
On Aug. 31, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that “John Galliano: Horizons,” its planned spring 2027 exhibition, would not proceed. The museum described a joint decision with Galliano. The reversal followed opposition over his history of anti-Semitic remarks, including objections from community leaders, politicians and donors.
What interests me here is the exhibition itself. When a museum exhibits an artist’s work, does it endorse the artist? How much room is there between studying a creative legacy and celebrating its author?
An exhibition makes an argument through its selection, interpretation and omissions. It can place artistic achievement alongside uncomfortable history. It can ask viewers to confront the relationship between the work they admire and the person who made it.
The framing matters. A retrospective presented as a triumph conveys something different from an exhibition that examines how that triumph was built, whom it affected and what complicates it. If the proposed tribute became untenable, could a more searching exhibition have remained possible?
Galliano apologized and returned to a major creative role, spending a decade at Maison Margiela before his departure in 2024. His professional comeback makes the familiar language of a career “thrown away” insufficient. What is at stake now is the authority to interpret that career and determine its institutional place.
We often ask when an artist should be forgiven. For a museum, another question may be more useful: Must forgiveness come before the work can be examined?
The Met continues to hold and credit Galliano’s designs in its collection. He remains part of its account of fashion history. That makes the boundary between collecting, exhibiting and honoring particularly interesting.
Then there are the clothes and the money. Why can “Dior by John Galliano” remain a source of desirability while an exhibition devoted to Galliano becomes contested? What allows the object to travel more easily than the name attached to it?
A vintage sale does not necessarily generate revenue for Dior or Galliano. The seller, collector, fashion house and museum occupy different positions. Following those distinctions brings us to a more precise question: Who retains the economic value of creative work, and who takes responsibility for interpreting its history?
I respect a line. I want to understand how it is drawn across the market and the museum.
Culture is politics. Art is political. But money is not?
Money helps decide what can be produced, preserved and seen. It pays for exhibitions and provides institutions with room to take risks. The possibility of its withdrawal can also narrow that room. To examine cultural judgment seriously, we have to examine the conditions under which it is exercised.
Now let us take a flight from New York to Venice.
There, one of my favorite couples, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, stars in Florian Zeller’s “Bunker.” The film follows an architect commissioned to design a survival bunker for a billionaire, with consequences for his marriage.
Also premiering at Venice, Alex Gibney’s documentary “Musk” examines the technology entrepreneur and real-life billionaire's power and influence.
A fictional billionaire wants to build a bunker. The image stays with me: a private space in which the promise of abundance might survive the failure of the world outside.
Here, Le Guin returns. Those who leave Omelas refuse the conditions of their happiness. The billionaire’s imagined retreat purchases protection from a shared future. The moral meaning of departure depends on what someone is leaving behind, and why.
The architect also gives this question a creative form. What does it mean to put one’s skill at the service of another person’s power? A commission provides the means to make something. It also gives that creativity a purpose chosen by someone else.
“Musk” brings ownership into the conversation. An artist may need a platform to reach an audience. A platform owner can influence the conditions under which that audience encounters the work. Criticism remains possible, but the ability to speak and the ability to shape distribution are different kinds of power.
Cinema can scrutinize a billionaire. A museum can reconsider a designer. Neither act takes place outside the structures of money, ownership and recognition that culture seeks to examine.
So who has the power?
The curator who decides what deserves attention? The donor who helps make the exhibition possible? The audience that challenges its premise? The owner who controls access to that audience?
Hollywoodupia’s residents may appear in the same photographs while holding very different rights within the city. Some depend on invitations. Others own the venues.
The question is what a cultural institution does with the authority it holds. Can it make artistic achievement and uncomfortable history visible together and trust its audience to think?
A museum’s judgment should begin with what an exhibition can help us understand. The difficult work is deciding how to show it.
