Jamison Kent joints Elephant and gowithYamo for their first in-person dating event at Somerset House’s Virtual Beauty.
It’s one of those perfect early autumn Saturdays, and Somerset House is as busy as ever. In the courtyard, a queue of tourists and men in chinos wait to enter Dior’s ‘Fort Sauvage’ fragrance pop-up, designed like a futuristic military compound. The scent follows me inside, where I join the guests of the Elephant magazine x gowithYamo dating event for bisexual art lovers, fittingly held during Bi Visibility Week.
Many of the guests are Elephant Magazine subscribers or loyal gowithYamo users (think: Letterboxd for art exhibitions). Others were targeted by a well-aimed Instagram ad, or turned up solo after hearing about it from a friend who bailed last minute with a hangover. Among the crowd are two pairs of friends who figured, worst case, it would be a memorable night out—and best case, well, who knows what might just happen.
The first part of the evening includes a tour of the Virtual Beauty exhibition, which examines how digital culture is shaping our perceptions of beauty and identity. As we weave through the space, the guests and I discuss ideal meet cutes. Their answers are humble and homogeneous: “through friends” or “through a shared interest” appear in everyone’s top three. The first now feels antiquated, while the latter is rare. “That’s why this event was so enticing. Fine art is so important to me as an identity, so meeting someone in that surrounding whether, it’s set up or organic, would be ideal,” one guest explains. Her friend jumps in to recall the scene in Gossip Girl where Blair is approached at the Louvre. “C’mon, it’s the dream!”
Guests sneak looks at one another, balancing small talk as they wander between Qualsha Wood’s cybernetic tapestry It’s All For U (If U Rlly Want It) (2024) and Ines Alpha’s interactive I’d rather be a cyborg (2024) installation. An exhibition is a built-in icebreaker, an effortless way to sidestep awkward silences that might occur on a first date or at an event like this one. Observing someone in a gallery or museum is one of the quickest ways to get to know them. You can learn a lot by noticing which pieces they linger over longer than others. There’s a quiet intimacy in experiencing an exhibition with someone.
Later, we drift over to Setlist, a restaurant and music venue tucked behind Somerset House, overlooking the Thames. We’re not even one cocktail in before dating apps are mentioned. Everyone at the table has either used one or is still swiping. A guest is swift to make the distinction that she’s on dating apps, “only out of necessity.” The others nod knowingly as they dig into their pizza. There’s nothing that bonds people faster on a date than shared disillusionment with the modern dating scene.
For most of us, dating apps have been around as long as we have been dating. Tinder launched the year I got my first smartphone, and had my first crush on someone that wasn’t a member of One Direction or an anthropomorphic character in a Pixar film. App fatigue and all, it’s hard to deny their track record. “I know lots of people who are married, and some even with children, who met on an app. So it obviously works, but I’m over it—tired of the algorithm,” one guest laments.
Our current relationship with technology falls under one category: it’s complicated. The exhibition doesn’t shy away from this. Aleksander Nærbø’s film Himbo culture is dying / vulnerable narcissism (2024) investigates how male body image is being reshaped by online gay dating culture through a montage of text conversations and thirst traps. Meanwhile, Frederik Heyman’s Virtual Embalming (2018) examines how technology might allow us to transcend not only traditional concepts of beauty but even our physical bodies post mortem. The collection of work maps our dynamic with technology: the good, the bad, and the messy situationship of it all. Nerves and cautious optimism permeates the exhibition, similar to the emotions one might feel on a first date.
