Ever the studied provocateur, the author Bret Easton Ellis had already heralded the Gagosian Gallery opening of his collaborative text paintings with the artist Alex Israel with the advance tweet: “50 Million People Can’t Be Wrong. Brexit. Trump. Etc.” So, more feather ruffling was predicted for his in-conversation with Israel in the august surroundings of the Royal Institution on Friday (3 February). And he didn’t disappoint.
Polite smiles in an audience—which included the Serpentine Gallery’s Yana Peel and Simon de Pury—visibly tightened at the author’s swift rejoinder to the moderator Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s description of the current US situation as “an unfolding nightmare”. “Half the country is very happy about the outcome and how fast it's moving. It happened, he was elected. #whytrumpwon,” declared Easton Ellis emphatically.
Although adding the safeguarding caveat that he had not voted for Trump and that his “boyfriend was a Bernie Sanders supporter”, Easton Ellis then piled on the discomfort by expressing his apparent approval of Trump’s devastating impact on the Republican Party and the Washington establishment, as well as the way in which the new president “made the media look worthless”. There were broadsides against “the neo-liberal elite” and especially against Meryl Streep, who he described as “a woman living in a $30m house” who should have “talked about the great film directors she has worked with” rather than “crying about Trump” in her recent speech at the Golden Globes.
According to Easton Ellis, the current wave of protest against President Trump and his policies “only aids the divisiveness” and what is needed is to “put aside differences and work with what we have”. Quite how this rapprochement is to be achieved, he did not reveal. But perhaps the most accurate insight into Mr. Easton Ellis’s now repeatedly-declaimed but somewhat moveable stance on the US’s current status quo, lies in one of the texts emblazoned across his and Israel’s billboard paintings: “This isn’t a real relationship, she told him, shrugging. It’s showbiz.” For as another of his and Israel’s works at Gagosian states: “Can 50 Million People be Wrong? Probably.”