In the run-up to Natalie Portman’s best actress Oscar win at the 83rd annual Academy Awards on 27 February 2011 at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, Los Angeles, California, for her all-consuming portrayal of ballerina Nina Sayers in a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the Darren Aronofsky–directed film Black Swan, over in Paris, a number of unsettling reports of expressions of racism recently voiced by John Galliano surfaced, which prompted fashion house Christian Dior to suspend their head designer.
These allegations were given weight when British tabloid newspaper The Sun, published on their website, on 28 February 2011, a short mobile phone video recording, made in December 2010, of Galliano proclaiming a love for Hitler and an unmistakable disdain for ugly people while winding down the evening at La Perle café-bar in Paris. The video footage led Dior to dismiss him on 1 March 2011, while Portman stated she will no longer endorse his work.
In these increasingly crowded, complex and uncaring times, where the realities of horror, war and genocide are closing flanks, is it any surprise that such an arguably great, sensitive artist like Galliano, pre-occupied with the pursuit of perfection, elegance and beauty in his creations, would be susceptible to concepts of chaos and corruption, and possess a dark ugliness, that would rear its head in times of inebriety? With her Oscar win, Natalie Portman affirms that purity and beauty, although a rarity, are by no means mutually exclusive.
By Arturo Tora on Arts and Culture
Tokyo (4 March 2011)
