Lunar Follies

HYGINUS RILLE

The annual Groundbreakers exhibit consists primarily of the “Effete,” as the useful if not especially knowledgeable catalogue insists on calling the various imagings that comprise this year’s show. Debbie Danfort, the curator of the exhibition, is, not to put too fine a point on it, a “dumb broad,” as they say in the meatpacking district’s hippest and hottest diners, even though she occasionally reviews — you’ll pardon the expression — new fiction, whatever that may be, for The New York Times Book Review. In any event, this year we have wild maladies of the sky, green shades, the radiance, the radiance, the stars’ bliss in blissful heaven, seasons in the evening, and a green beast, a bloated beast, a beast serene in the purple shade of a copse called “Satan’s Ear,” and a sleepy, mildewed, fat beast to, as they like to say, boot; then there is a startling display of summer, broiling, humid, stinking, rotting, with its moisture, its heat, its sticky sidewalks, madness, crime, murder, lust, and noise, rank blooms, sagging trees, overgrown gardens, tough jays and dusty grackles and boss crows, the sweet virtuosic repertoire of grey mockingbirds on the evening air, from black trees, from rose skies, from beyond the blue hydrangeas, next to which stands an authentic honest-to-God young virgin in white linen dress, white stockings, white shoes, her hair tied back in a chignon with a white silk ribbon, it’s too good to be true, her hand extended toward one of the massive nodding blooms. All this has been managed so as to arouse the brittle laughter of the cruel, the stupid, the shambling half-dead in putrefyingly expensive clothes; whose seams gap and tear; whose seams pop open or rip immediately upon wearing; “who may die before their time, Deo volente,” some bitter and unpleasant person says on an elevator.