Joseph Geagan

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

So life is unfair? You didn’t notice that it’s a comedy, ha ha!

Would you like some ash in your tea?

A muscular young man pinches his nipples just to feel something, while an elderly debauché fingers a string of pearls with bored disdain.He does not behold his lover but points limply to some unknown other object.

Perfidious it-girls and gays, straight charlatans and the various succubi of New York and L.A. You’ve seen them in the streets and on the gram, protagonists of the pleasure places.


Stale ash, wine, and sweat merging with hints of perfume, perhaps Frederic Malle’s Musc Ravageur. Glasses clinking, ass cheeks softly rattling to Lana del Rey for a moment before sinking back into the settee languorously. The consuming lust and fatigue of the after hours, the perseverance to stay up, to get a connection, a picture or maybe a nut, followed by the resignation to lethargy and running mascara.

A degenerate family sits in a restaurant booth while the plump thighs of Courbet’s 

 watch over the decline of the evening. Two women sit and peruse a book on the couch, but we know they are really reading the room––for who is who, who fucked who, who envies who.


While Bruegel’s painting is about the battle between carnival and lent, between pleasure and religious chastity, here the battle is between ninnies and buffoons who are just as ridiculous but at least manage to entertain. This is an outdoor orgy of dissipation where upper crust collectors, nepo babies, and demi-monde deviants––all pretending to be one another––line up to get into the same establishment. A married couple wheels a corpulent top-hatted man on a rolling podium. A bare butted man grills a steak by a toilet while meticulously groomed poodles strut by. A performer in a red corset shoots a gun. No one cares.

What do they all seek in the depths of the night? Beauty? No, it is nothing at all, for it is in the exalted seeking that we are found.


Joseph Geagan and Ruby McCollister on Birds, Breasts, and Bruegel