Hannah Gadsby, Then and Now

The Brooklyn Museum has finally unveiled its long-awaited Picasso exhibit, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” to widespread criticism: Artnews, the New York Times, and Hyperallergic have all published critical reviews.

So, of course, attendance at the museum skyrocketed, going up 51 percent when droves of viewers lined up to see what critics hated so much. I tried to talk a friend of mine into attending but even a bribe of old fashioneds and gin and tonics (our favourites) would not suffice: “I think we would both be a little too angry to feel it was worth it,” they pointed out. I thought of suggesting that we could treat ourselves to an excellent dinner afterwards but they were right: was it really worth making it from Chicago to New York for an undoubtedly irritating experience?

If I seem so sure about my response, it’s because I’ve written extensively on Gadsby, in “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship,” republished as “Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation” in Evergreen Review. The latter version, beautifully edited and produced by Dale Peck and the team at Evergreen, features art by female cubists like María Blanchard, Liubov Popova, Mainie Jellett, and Alice Bailly—none of whom were mentioned by Gadsby and whose work, as far as I can tell, hasn’t made it into the exhibit. Both essays take on the Netflix show Nanette, a televised record of her standup show of the same name—it’s what which propelled Gadsby to stardom for her takes on trauma, art, and Pablo Picasso.

In 2018, most publications swooned endlessly over Nanette. If Gadsby and an entity like the Brooklyn Museum had then decided to capitalise on the success of that show and create an exhibit on the artist, critics would have sung its praises. The world of mainstream criticism—book, art, movies, theatre, any other medium—is a deeply corrupt one, and generally sways to the zeitgeist: the Times, a newspaper whose critics are for the most part a fawning, gutless lot, would never have permitted an actual art critic—and a man—to write a critical review. Artnews and Hyperallergic are both much more serious and non-mainstream avenues for art criticism, but I suspect even their reviews would have been more muted or even absent: smaller publications might not have wanted to take on the hassle of coping with the inevitable social media backlash from the comedian’s fans (to be very clear: I don’t think that the individual critics noted here would have hesitated to write then what they write now—I just don’t think their publications would have solicited their work).

The critiques of “It’s Pablo-matic” are entirely unsurprising, given that Gadsby’s previous work so far has shown only mediocre talent at comedy and none at all in art criticism and given that it was, from its start, designed to be little more than a provocation. But it is surprising that Gadsby is no longer uncritically feted for their supposedly bold and original voice or their critique of misogyny. Instead, their perspective is being dissected and exposed for the childish rant that it is. The question isn’t whether “It’s Pablo-matic” is good or bad. The question is why and how it is that Hannah Gadsby, once an invulnerable darling of the mainstream media, can now actually be criticised. What changed?

When I first published my work on Nanette, it was greeted with anger and even rage in many quarters, with several people accusing me of being unnecessarily cruel and callous towards an artist speaking the truth to power, as they saw it. I thought then, and still believe, that Gadsby was an untalented and deeply unfunny hack of a comedian and that their knowledge of and approach to art and art history was vacuous, mean-spirited and—this requires bluntness—ignorant. Here’s just one example of their “critique”:

Pablo Picasso: I hate him. But you’re not allowed to. I hate him. But you can’t: “Cuuubism.” And if you ruin Cuuubism then civilisation as we know it will crumble. Cubism aren’t we grateful…we live in a post-cubism world…I don’t like Picasso, I fucking hate him… he’s rotten in the face cavity—I hate Picasso! I hate him and you can’t make me like him! …

These are the rantings of a petulant child who had the good fortune to be placed on the multimillion dollar global stage of what was at the time a giant media corporation. And then, of course, there was their use of trauma and the way that the show plugged into what was at the time a prevailing discourse around the subject.

As I wrote,

Trauma has always been a precondition for queers and women to enter into public discourse: there is no coming out without providing first a narrative of having been bashed, or raped, or brutalised in some way and women are not permitted to inhabit public spheres without having demonstrated at least some evidence that they have been physically and emotionally wounded. If you are a queer and/or a woman of colour, trauma is an absolute requirement for any degree of success: … If not stories of trauma, women of colour must, at the very least, tell stories of struggle….Trauma, particularly for women and queers of colour, is what guarantees authenticity, and without authenticity there is no entrance into public life. Even in seemingly private lives, those without trauma narratives are constantly asked to draw detailed images of the suffering they have endured. Increasingly, a woman without a tragic story is no woman at all. Trauma has been sacralised, taking the place of motherhood and wifedom.

And,

In effect, her story is an open-ended, multi-visa passport that transports her to any place in the world, making her into an ambassador of Trauma And How To Deal With It. Nanette’s success has not simply given us a new celebrity: it has established and cemented very specific paradigms of gender and queerness, relaying both through the enactment of Trauma in the public eye, and it has made all that a global phenomenon. In the process, Nanette has come to not only make queers’ and women’s trauma legible in very particular ways but cemented a cultural process of legibility.

As time went on, and the cultural discourse on trauma shifted somewhat (I’ve written frequently on the subject and will take a great deal of the credit for dislodging it from its pedestal), Gadsby (who shifted to they/their pronouns after Nanette) was still able to use their anti-Picasso rants to keep their anti-establishment, feminist credibility. Trauma still remains a defining trope for too many, especially people of colour and especially women. Roxane Gay “teaches” a whole Masterclass on how to excavate it to become a successful writer, and scores of immigrant activists and writers vomit out their trauma narratives because it’s the only way to compel anyone to read their books or show up to fight for their rights. Trauma is everywhere: if you can’t speak of yours, you simply don’t belong anywhere.

The problem for Gadsby is that “trauma” as discussed on Nanette isn’t something that translates easily into an art show. Oh, rather: it could have been, and it does seem that, in some ways, “It’s Pablo-matic” is about the trauma of having to live under the shadow of the artist—but exploring that would have taken more subtlety than Gadsbsy or her co-curators are capable of. It can take months, sometimes a year or more, to put together an art exhibit—and this one was only announced sometime in Fall 2022, when a bi-national arts commission announced that the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death would be marked by over three dozen exhibitions around the world. Several of the subsequent announcements about the events highlighted the Brooklyn Museum, noting that it would “engage some of the compelling questions young, diverse museum audiences increasingly raise about the interconnected issues of misogyny, masculinity, creativity, and ‘genius,’ particularly around a complex, mythologised figure like Picasso.”

The short turnaround time (and the expenses involved) might also explain why the exhibit appears to not have a lot of the art that might help it to make, well, any point at all besides, “I hate Picasso.” But trauma, or TRAUUUUUUMA, as Gadsby liked to say the word, is a hard concept to reflect, with any nuance. And Gadsby lacks nuance of any kind.

What then of the central topic, the misogyny and masculinity? As critics have pointed out, Picasso’s relationships to women—in life and in his art—are not exactly taboo subjects. Feminist art critics like Linda Nochlin have written about these subjects, long before Nanette came on the scene. But the show and Gadsby—and their particular take on misogyny and sexism—appeared at a very particular time in history: the Trump years (2016-2020, in case we need reminding).

Gadsby was already performing Nanette in 2017, when Netflix got wind of it and signed her up for the 2018 special. By then, we were a year and a half into the Donald Trump presidency, after a win that surprised even him. Sexual harassment and assault were baked into the political landscape: in October 2016, a month before the election, newly released videotapes revealed the now infamous “grab them by the pussy” comments by Trump—and he still won. Hillary Clinton had run a campaign with the words, “I’m the Last Thing Standing Between You and the Apocalypse.” So arrogant and confident was she that people had no choice but to vote for her that she didn’t even bother to campaign in places like Wisconsin. By now, it’s easy to forget that Clinton’s husband Bill had long been accused of sexual assault, or that the pair had set out to systematically destroy the life and career of a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, engaging in the worst kind of slut-shaming. Trump was and is monstrous, certainly, but the many marches by pink-pussy-hat-clad women were also exercises in forgetfulness: Trump was not a departure from some staid, respectful world of politics where women were treated with respect but a physical manifestation of the dark undercurrent of sexual abuse and harrassment that has always been a part of public and private life for millions of women. Nanette helped to paper over these contradictions and Gadsby’s performative anger and rants against misogyny created a text that seemed to articulate a groundswell of anger among women and queers who felt angry and thwarted by the 2016 election.

Nanette also swung by the coattails of the hashtag #MeToo, which has long masqueraded as a movement. First used in 2005 by Tawana Burke, a Black sexual assault survivor, to help others like her know they were not alone, #MeToo was taken up in October 2017 by mostly white celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Gwyneth Paltrow to bring attention to accusations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein (Milano, under criticism, eventually acknowledged Burke’s contribution). Nanette landed in this particular cultural space, and its themes (Gadsby described their own horrific experiences with rape) especially resonated at the time.

In this context, Nanette burst onto Netflix as a part of extremely flammable conversations about misogyny and sexual assault, and it seemed especially relevant given who was president at the time: like the pink pussy hats, watching and identifying with the themes of the show and Gadsby became part of a resistance of sorts. Consequently, as I learned too well, being actually critical of the show (which was tedious, deeply unfunny, and exploited the concept of trauma to cheap ends) meant that you were on the side of every force of evil.

And then, of course, there was Netflix.

It is hard to believe this now, given how it sputters and casts around looking for an identity, but Netflix was once considered a media giant and a sign of the future: it could do no wrong, and it could never fail. Originally an online version of chains like Blockbuster and the tiny video stores that once dotted even the smallest towns, Netflix became what’s known as a “streaming giant.” It has recently done away with its DVD mail service, choosing to focus on its online-only business. But that hasn’t always worked to its advantage: in April of this year, it attempted a livestream of its popular show “Love Is Blind” and suffered an “epic” failure, leaving viewers staring at blank screens. It has also been steadily losing subscribers, according to reports. Some of the reasons for this have to do with changes in its subscription models—implementing paid sharing is unpopular among viewers. But there’s also the problem that Netflix simply does not have the talent or the breadth to become an entertainment model on par with conventional films and television. For too long, the streamer has depended on the idea that it has a glut of material for viewers to choose from, and that they will stick around for that but the truth is that its offerings have always been meagre. When it does produce excellent and popular shows, like The Santa Clarita Diet, it abruptly cancels them.

As I wrote,

Netflix is opaque about its holdings because, as it turns out, its catalogue is remarkably unimpressive. Hunt for something as innocuous and popular as Hollywood musicals, and you’re bound to come up short—even South Pacific and Carousel are nowhere to be found, listed as “Unknown” under “Availability.” Forget about a catalogue: Netflix can’t even keep track of what you watched hours ago, and leaves you with the frustrating experience of scrolling through meaningless lists and categories looking for the last episode of that detective show that you were watching last night as you nodded off to sleep.

And yet, around the time of Nanette, in 2018, Netflix was considered the apex of streamers and critics regularly kissed its ass, fearful that anything less might mean being denied access to even its meaningless blather about those famous algorithms. One such particularly fervent ass-kisser was Jason Zinoman of the New York Times, who was allowed to dine with two Netflix executives who fed him a great deal of nonsensical verbiage about their methods that he then vomited back to readers: “The Netflix system has more than 2,000 “taste clusters” that measure content by tone, timbre and feeling to predict what you will want to see when you log onto the site. Netflix places more emphasis on whether a show is uplifting, somber or redemptive than on genre or who the director is. But what do these new metrics say about comedy that the rest of us cannot see?
Netflix is famously tight-lipped about data. It won’t release audience information to the news media or comics, who would love to know who watches their specials to plan tours.”

All of this was utter and complete rubbish: Netflix was only being “tight-lipped” because it knew there wasn’t much to say and most of what it had to say was made up. What it hinted at as some mastery of mysterious algorithms was nothing but old-fashioned surveillance or, as I wrote, “In the world of mathematics, algorithms are predictive formulations designed to provide informed hypotheses. In the world of media, “Algorithm” is just a word that makes surveillance look like a scientific inevitability.”

Netflix may seem to have very little to do with an art show at the Brooklyn Museum—purists might harrumph that, really, surely an art show is nothing like a comedy special but we have to remember an obvious but unacknowledged point: without Netflix and Nanette, there would be no “It’s Pablo-matic.” Sure, Gadsby’s standup routine, which they performed at many venues, might have achieved fame of on its own, but it would never have achieved the kind of cultural currency that it did as a successful show seen by millions, across the globe (even India’s Shah Rukh Khan, a film star who is better known than Tom Cruise in many parts, felt compelled to tweet his praise).

If “It’s Pablo-matic” exists today, it’s because of this strange combination of factors: the election of an American president whose sexual predation was a distillation of the misogyny at the heart of American culture, a hashtag that masqueraded as a movement but kept alive the spectre of sexual assault, and a media behemoth that bellowed like a lion and now struggles to explain exactly why anyone should pay for the privilege of accessing indifferently made shows while it cancels others that seem to be doing perfectly well, often mid-story (like The Santa Clarita Diet, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet).

Hannah Gadsby will be fine. Their standup career may still wheeze along for a while, despite the fact that they’re not very funny (I’ve watched Douglas, their second Netflix special, and can’t remember a thing and I’m trying to make it through with Something Special, their third such endeavour, but may soon give up). Like the Marvel multiverse, which gives us yet more tired tales of gods and heroes, there will always be another Hannah Gadsby special on Netflix where they pick at some insignificant point as if at a scab—a dog, a mean waitress, a potted plant, who knows. As Graham Ashmore noted to me in a Facebook conversation, “Gadsby yokes themself to Picasso seeking a reflected posterity.” It’s likely that many future discussions of Picasso will have to mention Gadsby, even if just to dismiss them. Given his place in the art world, that’s a large spot in a massive landscape of art criticism.

Gadsby fulminates about misogyny in the art world, but they are quiet about the Brooklyn Museum’s ties to the Sackler family, which is directly responsible for nearly 500,000 deaths during the opioid crisis. Many art institutions have cut their ties to the Sacklers, but not the Brooklyn Museum—one of Gadsby’s co-curators is “Catherine Morris, the Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.” Whoops.

When asked about the connection, Gadsby blew it off and then made the problem something else entirely, as quoted in Artnews: “There’s an elephant in the room [with Elizabeth A. Sackler], yeah. There’s a problem with money in the art world, generally. That also is part of my perspective on Picasso. Like, is he a hero, or is he just worth a lot of money?”

But the problem with the Sacklers isn’t about the money: the problem is that the money has been made by profiting off the deaths of so many, and that cultural institutions are refusing to be part of that. The connection between art patrons who seek cultural and political legitimacy and artists who need funding is an ancient one, but the Sacklers have been coming under intense public scrutiny. Picasso was a horrible human, sure, by many accounts, but he wasn’t responsible for mass death. If anything, um, Guernica and many of his other works are all about death and war, and an indictment of the latter.

Gadsby may not be a very funny comedian, but they have long been able to skate by with this kind of slippery discursive distraction, and there will always be feminists and queer people who give them permission to distract from thorny, complicated issues in favour of a childish screed about a dead artist.

Who knows? Perhaps their relatively long run in the limelight is coming to an end—perhaps they will finally be compelled to sharpen their comedic skills and leave art alone.