When Art Pranksters Invaded Melrose Place

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Hi, I'm here with Isaac Butler, a cultural critic and historian who you may remember from the episode we did about method acting back in 2022.

Hey, Willa.

Isaac, I would really like you to tell us about this art exhibition that was put on in the late 1990s in Los Angeles that was full of cheeky, funny, slightly mysterious work that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see in an art museum.

Sure, yeah.

So let me just describe a few of the pieces for you.

There was a pool float, but instead of a normal pool float, it looked like a sperm about to fertilize an egg.

There was a clock where all the numbers on the clock had been replaced with images of bacteria and viruses.

There was a quilt, but the pattern on the quilt was the chemical formula for the abortion pill.

It was a lot of work like that.

I have to confess that I find this all like cool and delightful, and I kind of covet it.

Like I would put that clock in my house and I certainly wish that I could have seen the show.

Yeah, but you know, the amazing thing is, is that you probably did actually see this work, and so did millions of Americans.

This is a story that I learned about while I was researching the new book I'm working on, which takes place in the art world in the 80s and 90s.

All of this work was masterminded by an artist named Mel Chin.

And to give you a sense of what Mel's like, when I asked him where he was in his career when he started doing this, this is what he said.

Well,

my career, I don't think about my art making and practice as a career.

Mel is being very modest here.

He is a conceptual artist known for everything from traditional paintings to giant landscape art, and he has also won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

And back in the early 1990s, he was commissioned to take part in that show we mentioned earlier.

It was called Uncommon Sense and it was a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art where the museum commissioned artists to create work that upended the traditional relationship between artist and spectator.

And Mel was thinking about this commission and how to make something that might also speak to Los Angeles when he he was on an airplane.

And I remember looking out the window, it might have been over Kansas or some Midwestern state, and the lights were on.

I started to think LA is in the air.

It's through microwave transmission.

And it's through the television that's on down there.

Television made in LA was in the atmosphere and it was being beamed down to Kansas and the the rest of the country too.

What if you could take those microwave transmissions, those little bits of television, those pieces of LA and harness them to introduce people to new art and ideas?

He was still thinking about all of this when he got home.

And when he walked in the door, his wife was watching TV.

And there was a huge blonde head, a blonde-haired head in the middle of the screen.

And I think think she said, That's Heather Lochler.

Worry a minute.

You're fired.

Fire.

You are a pathetic, sick excuse for a man.

And if my mother wants you so badly, she can have you and all the crap that comes with you.

She moved her head.

And there was a painting behind it.

I said, That's it.

It will be Mauro's place.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willipaskin.

In the mid-1990s, a collective of roughly 100 artists would spend three years smuggling sperm floats, viral clocks, and dozens of other pieces of provocative art onto the set of the hit primetime soap opera, Melrose Place.

They called themselves the Gala Committee, and they called their project in the name of the place.

Today, Isaac Butler is going to tell the story of this unlikely art installation, a tremendous feat of art hijinks that hit right up against the limitations of mass media to get us to see what's right in front of our faces.

So, today on Decodering, how did Melrose Place become the home of hundreds of pieces of contemporary art?

And why did no one notice?

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So Mel Chin had his airplane epiphany in 1994.

What he wanted to do was something like an art heist, but in reverse.

Instead of stealing art from a museum, he wanted to smuggle art into television.

Now, in any good heist movie, the first thing you need to do is assemble your crew.

You need a demolitions guy, a pickpocket, an actor, an electronics expert, and so on.

Mel,

well, he didn't really have any of that.

What he had instead were students, a lot of students.

Mel was teaching both at Cal Arts in Los Angeles and at the University of Georgia in Athens.

He introduced the concept of the project in class the day after Halloween, which it turns out the Cal Arts crew took very seriously.

People still had blood dripping from their mouths.

It was a motley crew, and I introduced the concept

and people thought I was kidding.

We had just had our Halloween party, which was legendary at CalArts.

John Lapointe was a student of Mel's.

Then they met this crazy dude who was all very serious in photos and wearing gray suits and stuff.

And he was kind of a crazy, crazy son of a bitch.

Really?

After Mel explained the idea, John, who was one of the first to join the project, was instantly intrigued.

His mind started to whirr.

How would one,

you know, insert?

All right, well, what would you make of the, what would you talk about?

What would you do if you had access?

What would you do?

They started trying to figure all of this out.

First, they gave themselves a name.

The Gala Committee, the GA for Georgia, the LA for Los Angeles, both of the places where Mel was teaching.

Second, they decided how it would be organized, non-hierarchically.

It couldn't just be the Mel Chin Show.

And third, they also made a decision about how the committee would operate.

The heist crew will have to do it secretly.

We have to keep it quiet.

We have to be careful.

The reason they wanted to keep it under wraps had to do with their inspirations, which also used stealth to their advantage.

One was something as old as the soap operas themselves.

The Guiding Light, presented by Ivory Soap, the most famous soap in the world.

The television is a modern etching tool,

etching into our brains products, because that's what a soap opera is.

It was invented to sell product and place things appropriately in our minds.

The soap opera got its name way back in the 1930s and 40s, when they were seen as vehicles for companies to sell household products to homemakers.

By the time Melrose Place was on the air, product placement was a fixture of American television and movies.

But instead of announcing itself the way it did in the early days of television, product placement in the 1990s relied on subtlety.

Instead of saying a show was brought to you by Coca-Cola, you would just see your favorite characters drink Coca-Cola.

The Gala committee wanted to use this technique, but to place art concepts instead of products.

A second inspiration was an anti-capitalist art-making strategy called culture jamming.

John Lapoyne.

There were lots of instances of people using early mass communication tools or group communication tools to playfully screw with popular culture.

And,

you know, this was pre-internet days, so what else are you going to do, right?

Culture jamming was a leftist practice of pranksterism that used impish humor to critique the systems of big business and social conservatism that had become intertwined during the Reagan administration.

One of the most famous examples was something called the Barbie Liberation Organization, in which artists surreptitiously swapped the voice boxes on talking Barbies and G.I.

Joe's.

And on Christmas morning, talking Barbies are like, let's go kill them.

And G.I.

Joe was like, you know, I like baking.

And it made national news.

In press releases, the group claims to have gotten 300 altered Barbies and G.I.

Joes onto store shelves in 43 states.

Another inspiration was less whimsical, viruses.

At the time, the idea of virality was everywhere.

With the advent of the internet, hackers and computer viruses were taking over the public imagination.

And the phrase internet meme was coined in 1993 to describe a new viral way that ideas were spreading.

But most urgently, this was also the height of the AIDS crisis.

I was making all those biological associations, medical associations as well, especially in the wake of the AIDS epidemic and the tragedy, we wanted to do a creative response.

The notion was that the soap opera would be the host, the Gala Committee would be the virus, and their art was the RNA, transforming the show into a carrier for new ideas.

So now the Gala Committee had its name, its concept, its team, and its approach.

All they had to do was, you know, smuggle their work onto a hugely successful, closely observed TV show whose scripts were guarded like state secrets.

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The very reason that the Gala committee wanted to place their art on Melrose Place was also exactly the reason doing so seemed so unlikely.

Melrose Place was a huge, huge hit.

Emily Nussbaum is a writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic.

It was a nighttime soap opera, but it absolutely hit it big at that moment.

Hitting it big also meant something different then than it does now.

Back then, there were only four TV networks, and one of them was an upstart that had only launched in 1986 called Fox.

Fox tried to set itself apart by being younger and more provocative than the three established networks.

It aired shows like The Simpsons, Married with Children, and Beverly Hills 90210.

Hey, John.

Hey, Kelly.

Bryn and I were just talking.

Which do you think guys like best on girls, long or short hair?

Hmm, that's a deep question.

Personally, I prefer blondes.

90210 was created by the god of the prime time soaps, Aaron Spelling.

Over three decades, he had become one of the most powerful people in television, with hits like Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, and Dynasty.

And 90210 had helped put the fledgling Fox Network on the map.

Mark Harris is a cultural critic and historian who covered television in the 1990s as a writer and editor for Entertainment Weekly.

Even though everyone on Beverly Hills 90210 looked like they were 28 years old, it It was still set, not just in high school, but like freshman and sophomore year of high school at that point.

So there was only so much they could do with the plot lines.

And I think Fox and Aaron Spelling thought, why don't we do a spin-off that is focused on the lives of 20-somethings and we can be a lot more daring and a lot racier.

Melrose Place was that spin-off.

It premiered in 1992 and focused on the complicated lives of the very attractive and very horny residents of its titular apartment complex.

I would say that the difference between Melrose Place and previous primetime subs, there were two differences, really.

One was

a taste for really bizarre, ludicrous plot lines.

I mean, they...

They really had an appetite for somebody going out of their minds.

Michael, I'm going completely

and totally insane again.

The other thing that Melrose Place did that was really different, they accelerated through plot in this really aggressive way.

So there was this absolute mandate to tune in.

I've become three different people.

You see, sometimes I'm this woman, Betsy.

She's a dangerous prude.

But then Rita, she's the strong one.

She protects us from her.

Have you ever read the book Sybil?

At its peak, Melrose was watched by nearly 15 million people in real time.

It was the kind of show for which there were weekly viewing parties.

Everyone seemed to be watching it, from supporting characters on Seinfeld to the slackers of Reality Bites.

Melrose plays a really good show.

Can you list a few of your favorite zany, ludicrous plot developments on Melrose?

Well, I think the one that everybody remembers, and certainly

the one that I really loved, was Kimberly, the character played by Marcia Cross

getting killed, which, first of all, was a big deal.

Oh, God, no.

Call 911.

Oh, come on, where?

Like, Primetime Subs didn't kill a lot of characters off, and then disappearing, I believe, for like 10 or 12 episodes, and then coming back from the dead.

Of course, it's me, silly.

You want to touch me to make sure I'm real?

What's going on?

Is that Kimberly?

Why is she back?

What's happening?

And then she walks into the bathroom and she has this beautiful red hair and she pulls off her wig.

It's very dramatic.

She takes her fingers and pulls it off her and she has a shaved head and a huge, extremely dramatic scar on the side.

I was at a party with other people and people just like screamed with delight.

Like, you know, we laughed, but we gasped.

I mean, it was, which is the kind of

laughing and gasping at the same time is exactly the reaction that makes a primetime soap a hit.

One thing Melrose was not, however, was especially political.

The closest they got to any kind of political statement was a character named Matt, who was gay and out of the closet, and not much else.

Is that guy gay?

Yeah, what about it?

Nothing.

I'm just not used to to seeing somebody so upfront about it.

Oh gosh, I'm late for surgery, man.

Matt, the gay character who rarely has a boyfriend and barely has a personality, is a perfect summation of the show's point of view.

Just daring enough to get attention, but not enough to actually risk turning off viewers.

So Melrose was not only a gargantuan rating success overseen by a powerful name-brand producer, it was politically pretty timid.

And the Gala committee's whole project was explicitly, if slyly, political.

But the committee was undeterred, as in any good heist, they just needed an inside man, or, as it turned out, an inside woman.

We were watching Melrose Place, and we noticed in the credits the name Deborah Siegel came up as the set decorator.

John Lapointe, one of the earliest members of the Gala Committee, again.

We grabbed the phone book, and lo and behold, Deborah Siegel was listed.

So we called Deborah Siegel.

He

called me a few times, and I ignored him.

Deborah Siegel now goes by Deborah Siegel Constantino.

We connected on a spotty telephone line to talk about her time at Melrose.

She told me that when she finally stopped ignoring Melchin's calls, it turned out the project's politics, its interest in product placement, and virality were right up her alley.

Can you tell me about that?

Well, I was a very leftist, active

person.

I felt that Melrose's place was not not in line with my belief.

And so instead of saying no to this wacky project, she said, free art and I don't have to pay royalties for it and it looks interesting and it's left wing.

Bring it.

All right, this just got a little weird and real.

It was like, oh shit.

With the project to go, things had to move from theoretical to actual very fast.

The committee began to get grants and started bringing in outside artists to contribute.

I was sitting in my home office

and the phone rang.

Constance Penley is an artist and media theorist who currently teaches at UC Santa Barbara.

30 seconds into telling me about the project,

I said, I get it.

I'm in.

They would contact many artists this way.

And so the Gala Committee swelled.

From a dozen students to over a hundred participants.

People joined from other states too.

They would eventually draw a map of the United States with the Gala Committee's activities on it that looks like a swirl of arrows chasing each other around the country.

We would just start brainstorming and sending sketches.

to gala members at the University of Georgia where Mel was.

Get notes from them and brainstorm a piece.

Because so few of them have email, all of this happened over Fax Machine.

And then maybe it would go off to Grand Arts in Kansas City to be fabricated and then get sent back, you know, to Cal Arts.

Cal Arts happened to be right next to where Melrose Place was shot.

During this period, they designed some of the pieces we mentioned earlier.

The float for Melrose's pool that looked like a sperm about to fertilize an egg.

The viral clock.

They also designed and fabricated a piece called Safety Sheets, created by students in the textile department at the University of Georgia.

You can see it in multiple episodes of the show, but it's especially noticeable in an episode called Run, Billy, Run.

Please.

I thought morning was your favorite time.

Any morning but this one.

one.

During this episode, Lothario Dr.

Peter Barnes and his current lover wake up in his apartment, and if you know what you're looking for, you can see that the pattern on his sheets is unrolled condoms.

At the time, the FCC wouldn't allow unrolled condoms to be shown on air.

John Lapointe again.

That was the moon landing, as I like to call it.

That was the first like, oh my God,

it actually is happening.

Safety sheets was important because until then, it wasn't totally clear to the gala committee what was happening.

They sent the pieces off, but they didn't know how or if they would be used until they saw them show up on television.

And we would gather in a barn at a pizza joint and we watched the show.

Largely, it was hit or miss.

Actually, it largely was miss because you never quite knew

what would end up on the cutting room floor.

And lots of pieces did.

Even the ones that made it onto TV, like the viral clock and the sperm pool float, were pretty hard to see.

But several months into the project, this haphazard relationship got more serious.

It was thanks to a piece called Total Proof.

Now, I want to go all out on this.

Radio and print ads the best coverage and quality.

DD is going to make sure that this is the most successful new club this year.

DD.

The Gala Committee often designed posters that represented DD's work.

Total Proof was was one of these posters, and it was a parody of Absolute Vodka's ubiquitous 1990s print ad campaign.

So you may remember these.

They all show a bottle of absolute vodka, but with some variation to it that was then reflected in the ad's text.

Like a bottle would be drawn by Keith Herring and say, absolute herring underneath it, or it would have a halo over it with the slogan, absolute perfection.

The Gala Committee's version, well, it was an aerial photograph of the wreckage of the Oklahoma City bombing, which at that point was the largest and deadliest terrorist attack on U.S.

soil.

And it had happened less than a year earlier.

The committee took that photograph and photoshopped it to be in the shape of a liquor bottle with the slogan, Total Proof, underneath it.

This was the stealth culture jamming we're hacking basically at this point.

And like tee hee hee, they don't know what we're doing.

Total proof was the Gala Committee at its culture jammiest, a provocative spit take on a a popular ad campaign highlighting how capitalism can commodify anything.

But unlike the other Gala Committee work to this point, Total Proof did not go unnoticed by the powers that be at Melrose Place.

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Total Proof, the vodka ad with the Oklahoma City bombing on it, made its way onto set for the shooting of season four's 26th episode called Triumph of the Bill.

Before filming began for the day, a crew member noticed it.

The line producer at the time had seen it and objected and took it down.

Frank South was a writer and executive producer on Melrose Place.

Deborah came to me with that and said, well, you're going to hear about this and this is why I did it.

And

shoot, I was really enthusiastic.

It turns out that prior to being a writer for television, Frank South was actually a performance artist who himself had been part of a collective running a gallery and performance space in downtown New York.

When Deborah told him about the project, not only was he down to let the total proof poster appear on air, he was down to meet with Mel Chin.

They had lunch, hit it off, and Frank decided to loop the gala committee into the production process of the show.

Though not his boss, the show's mastermind, Aaron Spelling.

I always intended to tell Aaron about it.

You know, what I was doing, but at one point I decided not to because it was getting so

integral.

You know, it's like that old thing, you know, apologize, don't ask permission.

Everything immediately got more collaborative.

Melrose Place's production team became so intertwined with the project that they would eventually be added to the official list of Gala committee members.

The project also got more daring, pointed, and ambitious.

The artists knew their work would air, and they could help implement on-site installations.

So, for example, the committee went to the set of shooters, the bar where the characters drink, and replaced all the labels on the alcohol bottles with text relating the history of agribusiness, alcohol, and slavery in America.

They designed an ad campaign for the character Billy called Family Values that featured silhouettes of same-sex couples with children.

Building off of the success of safety sheets, they created created that quilt we talked about earlier, the one with the chemical formula for the abortion pill printed on it at a time when reproductive choice was rarely discussed on TV.

Gala committee member Constance Penley.

For two entire episodes, we had Allison, who was confined to her home with a difficult pregnancy, just be draped in this beautiful quilt.

No arguments.

We're supposed to be resting and taking care of our kid.

Everything else is secondary.

Those are the doctors' orders, not mine.

You're right.

I know.

So that was our way to be able to get speech about reproductive choice back onto network television.

One of their most audacious pieces, food for thought, hid in the most unlikely and ubiquitous of places.

And what about the Chinese takeout bags?

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Because knowing of the reruns and its its worldwide syndication and distribution, it did not have to be limited to English-speaking language.

And so they wrote provocative phrases in Mandarin on takeout containers.

On one, they put the Chinese character for turmoil that had been used to describe the Tiananmen Square protests next to the character for human rights.

On another, they wrote stolen artifacts, national treasure, a reference to colonial looting.

You know, a billion people could read Chinese.

The idea was having that power to speak to someone just through a casual viewing of a show and say, wait a minute, I read Chinese, and that's a message that is not even allowed.

Eventually, the committee was even asked to help flesh out the character of Samantha, who's an artist on Melrose Place.

Ah, it's the painting I gave Craig.

You didn't steal it, did did you?

Of course not.

15 of the women who worked on the Gala Committee were flown to Grand Arts in Kansas City to be able to brainstorm

this new character, but also to create her artwork.

Samantha's brightly colored art, which was created by Gala Committee members, referenced the sunny pools and California landscapes of David Hockney, but also contained a hidden darkness, the ghostly echo of the tragic histories of Los Angeles.

We made our locations be places where horrific violence had occurred.

You know, locations where the Manson murders occurred,

the Ambassador Hotel where Robert F.

Kennedy was assassinated.

Together, the production staff and the gala committee had created dozens of covert works of art and hidden them in plain sight.

Other popular primetime entertainment wasn't showing unrolled condoms on television or nodding at abortion or alluding to the legacy of slavery, but a group of scrappy artists and a pop cultural phenomenon did and reached an audience of millions and millions of people.

The only wrinkle was

no one watching seems to have really seen it.

After placing over 100 pieces of art on Melrose Place over the course of three seasons, it finally came time for the Gala Committee to show the world what they had been up to.

In March of 1997, In the Name of the Place opened as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Uncommon Sense exhibit.

They weren't the only ones with wild ideas about how to rethink the museum show.

Karen Finley had

live nude drawing classes going on, and Carlson and and Marilyn Strom had it rodeo with a live horse in the middle of the galleries.

Tom Finkel Pearl is one of the curators of Uncommon Sense.

There was a project that included 1.1 million pounds of crushed glass that was installed by the sanitation department of LA.

The museum even let the gala committee recreate Shooter's Bar and allowed patrons to drink at it.

Before the show opened at Mocha, the Gala Committee and the staff at Melrose had one last hurrah: filming a pivotal scene of an episode of Melrose within the exhibit of objects that had been previously seen on the television show.

Sorry if I stranded you.

Plants.

No, no problem.

I ain't digging this exhibit.

Got some phenomenal pieces.

Mel is actually in this scene.

He's lurking in the background, walking through the exhibit with Deborah Siegel Constantino.

What do you think it means?

I think it's about a man's journey through war.

Memory.

There was a fake director.

There was a fake museum communications officer.

There was art that wasn't art, but it was art.

Julie Lazar, co-curator of Uncommon Sense, loved that Melrose Place filmed at the museum.

It raised all the central questions of the exhibit itself.

I thought it was fantastic because it paralleled.

Was the work that was on the screen and set behind the actors art?

When was it art?

Was it on the television show or was it when they came to the gallery and it was hanging behind them?

Clearly, the gallerists, the gala committee, and the Melrose production team were having fun.

But once Uncommon Sense was opened to the public, not everyone was amused.

The show got like exceedingly bad reviews.

Actually, there's words that are just burned into my consciousness.

Those words come from the New York Times' Roberta Smith.

In a review that was titled A Lot to See, but Not an Artwork in Sight, she said of Gala's work that it has the raw, discombobulated feeling of a group show of young, undeveloped artists.

One of the things she said in that review, also, which is also sort of true,

is that it seems like the most profound and interesting or something like that experience happened before the show opened.

Asking questions about art's purpose and methods of creation doesn't always result in work that people enjoy or even notice.

Did you happen to notice that with some regularity, Melrose

used very, very odd props and set pieces that had actually been designed by an experimental art collective?

I would love to claim that I did notice that because it's a fascinating, completely bizarre piece of Melrose Place history, but no.

The answer to that question is no.

I had no awareness of this whatsoever.

In fact, almost anyone who heard about the experiment only learned about it after the fact, in the art reviews of the show and in an article for The New Yorker.

This was even true when it came to the head honcho of Melrose Place.

Frank South, the producer and writer who embraced the project, was at the office early one morning when Aaron Spelling summoned him.

Walk in to his desk, you know, across this acre of shag carpet.

He's saying,

So,

Frank, when did you know this was going on?

Oh, well, you know, for the last year and a half, two years or something.

And he goes, uh-huh.

So, when were you going to tell me?

And so, oh, Aaron,

not very,

I figured as late as possible, I was going to tell you.

Spelling wasn't known for bursts of rage, but Frank could see he wasn't happy.

It just came down to, you understand,

this is my show, you know.

And I said, yeah, I don't want anything that would ever harm the show.

And I said, I know.

One of the things he said is, who pays for all this shit?

Where does it all come from?

Who's paying for it?

Are we paying for this?

Is this in our budget?

And I said, no,

it's a money-saving operation.

It's for free.

And that mollified him a little.

I asked the people I spoke to about the work's initial invisibility.

And at the time, were they hoping people might notice?

Of course.

Sure, a little.

But this is commonplace with art.

Some of it connects with the public, and most of it doesn't.

It's just, you don't usually get it in front of an audience of 15 million people to begin with.

In the Name of the Place closed in the summer of 1997.

Two years later, Melrose Place went off the air.

It seemed that, like a lot of interesting art projects, In the Name of the Place was destined to be forgotten by everyone other than the Gala Committee.

But then, one of the committee's original inspirations turned out to be more apt than they could have anticipated.

It's about patients like a virus entering

your world.

It takes time for it to gestate.

The project gradually took on a new life.

Not on TV, not to millions of people, but a new life nonetheless.

In 1998, the objects from In the Name of the Place were auctioned off by Sotheby's, with the proceeds going to charity.

The project was exhibited in Korea and Kansas City and New Orleans.

In the fall of 2016, Red Bull Gallery in New York, itself an experimented branded content by an energy drink, remounted in the name of the place.

And this time, the reviews were good.

For John Lapointe, this kind of baton passing is immensely gratifying.

I mean, that's the whole tradition of art is, you know, just passing on as a conversation.

It constantly builds upon itself.

Melrose Place, a one-time cultural juggernaut, has less purchase than ever before, but in the name of the place, is still replicating.

It didn't go viral in the sense of finding immediate widespread popularity, but it wound up being viral in the sense of slowly reaching more and more hosts and spreading itself throughout the ecosystem.

First it lived in the minds of artists, and then it jumped to the people making a TV show, and then to articles in magazines and newspapers, and then to museums around the world, and then most of all to the internet, where Melrose Place and all the work it contained is just a few clicks away.

Now it has infected its latest host, this show.

And it continues to spread to you.

Go, take a look for yourself, and then, you know,

pass it on.

Yeah, it's weird to just woke, Doc.

There's like, like, you emailed me the other day, like, okay, here we go again.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Isaac Butler.

And I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written and reported by Isaac Butler.

Decodering is produced by Willip Haskin and Katie Shepard.

This episode was produced by Benjamin Frisch.

Derek John is executive producer.

Joe Meyer is senior editor-producer.

Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

We'd like to thank Jamie Bennett and also JJ Bursch for educating Isaac on product placement, Mark Flood for sharing his memories of the Gala Committee, and to shout out Cynthia Carr's book, On Edge, Performance at the End of the 20th Century, which is where Isaac first heard about all of this.

If you want to see some of the artwork from in the name of the place, we'll include a link in our show notes.

And please make sure to subscribe to our feed so you never miss an episode.

Even better, leave a review and rating wherever you listen and tell your friends.

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And you also have total access to Slate's website, and your support is essential to our ongoing investigations here at Decodering.

So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll see you next week.

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