“I’m thinking about the dynamics of power,” Brendan Fernandes, an artist, said the other day, on the Upper East Side. He is thirty-nine, with a shaved head, a trimmed beard, and an industrial earring that runs across the top of his left ear like a curtain rod. He wore a sweatshirt that read “Reigning Champ.” Fernandes, a former dancer, was about to headline the Young Collectors Party, at the Guggenheim, and had been given license to put on “performative interventions” with the theme “ballet kink.” The casting call was for “authoritative bodies.” Dancers would also have to be trained in ballet and O.K. with rope bondage.
Tickets were selling for two hundred and fifty dollars. “When I was a young dancer, we would be at the barre and développé our legs…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 20, 2019