‘Doom’ Has Everything, and Nothing

A friend of mine, a frequent visitor to Berlin’s nightclub scene, has repeatedly warned me never to attend concerts or parties without earplugs. With DJs pushing volume levels to dangerous extremes, he insists that protecting one’s hearing shouldn’t come at the expense of having fun. Unfortunately, I neglected his advice before attending Doom: House of Hope, an immersive spectacle of defiance and despair by German artist and choreographer Anne Imhof. As a result, I may have walked away with a case of tinnitus.

It’s not just your ears that might take a hit at the Park Avenue Armory, where Imhof’s large-scale performance has become one of the most eagerly awaited events of the winter season—and, thanks to both its performers and its audience, one of the most heavily featured on Instagram. Attendees begin the night penned in with a thousand others, unable to move forward due to crowd-control barriers. Soon, blank-faced performers with vacant stares drift toward the crowd as an ominous electronic drone fills the space. Before long, you’ll be free to roam the vast 55,500-square-foot Drill Hall, but be warned—like any practical German, you’d be wise to wear comfortable shoes, as you’ll be standing for the duration.

Scattered around the hall are two dozen pristine Cadillac Escalades, the vehicle of choice for America’s elite. Their roofs become platforms for lithe dancers and melancholic singers, while their trunks serve as pop-up bars, impromptu chess arenas, vaping lounges, and even makeshift tattoo stations. To keep up with Doom, you’ll need to weave between SUVs, climb onto stages, and even slip into dressing rooms. Overhead, a Jumbotron scoreboard counts down the night’s three-hour runtime.

The experience mirrors a night at a club—wandering through a repurposed warehouse, losing track of friends in the dark, fluctuating between moments of heightened emotion and complete detachment. If boredom sets in, there’s always your phone. In fact, for Imhof, your phone—and your boredom—are part of the performance.

This is an evening of stark contradictions, and my reaction refuses to fit neatly into a “love it or hate it” binary. Doom is self-indulgent, frivolous, even naïve at times—yet, despite all that, it still carries more weight than a hundred cash-and-carry Chelsea exhibitions. Its roughly 40 performers, often murmuring in monotone or simply staring blankly, embody a youthful nihilism that feels predictable and tiresome—until, in the final hour (by which time much of the audience had already left), the work undergoes a striking transformation, reaching an almost Romantic grandeur.

That Doom can feel both aimless and profound, that I disliked the majority of my time standing there yet still left feeling rewarded and even moved, speaks to Imhof’s rare ability to tap into the way contemporary audiences engage with art. Above all, she understands how screens have warped our perception of both art and life, leaving us in a constant state of overstimulation and disconnection. She struggles, visibly, to create something meaningful and powerful in 2025. But she’s certainly trying.

This marks Imhof’s first New York presentation in a decade. Her somber, brooding performances probe the effects of digital technology on the human body, psyche, and society. The city last saw her work in 2015 at MoMA PS1, where her gaunt performers cradled live rabbits and spat buttermilk into troughs in Deal. She gained international acclaim with Faust, presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where cold, streetwear-clad dancers met the gazes of onlookers who had queued for hours to enter the German Pavilion. With Faust, Imhof was one of the first to grasp a fundamental shift in the experience of art—where spectators, unlike in traditional theater, ballet, or opera, instinctively reach for their phones to record and share what they see. Her cast, chosen for their ethereal, androgynous presence, were keenly aware that their movements would be consumed as digital content.

In the aftermath of Trump’s election and the Brexit referendum, Imhof’s blend of club-kid posturing and totalitarian aesthetics—her German Pavilion likened a Nazi-era show palace to an Apple store—resulted in a strange mix of provocation and exclusivity. She shared this sensibility with Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia. But in Doom, it becomes apparent early on that fashion is no longer the focus: Balenciaga is out, Euphoria is in.

The young performers in Doom seem closer to a European fantasy of American high school, complete with gymnasium flooring laid across the Armory. Some wear basketball jerseys and cheerleader uniforms, and the cast includes a mix of German and American models, rappers, writers, actors, and outliers—including, believe it or not, Kim Gordon’s daughter. They move through the space, preening, brooding, embracing—but only a few, notably dancers Toon Lobach and Vinson Fraley, exhibit the intense self-awareness that once defined Imhof’s work.

Instead, Doom quickly settles into a fragmented format: not quite a grand, unified Gesamtkunstwerk, but a revue-like sequence of short, loosely connected vignettes—often lasting no more than five minutes, the length of a pop song. If you’re in the right place, you’ll see a scene up close; otherwise, you’ll have to crane your neck or simply miss it. Some moments are electrifying, such as Arthur Tendeng’s trio of rap performances in French and German, which inject a much-needed jolt of energy at the midpoint.

But others fall flat. Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s former partner and frequent collaborator, delivers derivative Velvet Underground-style songs. Elsewhere, you’ll endure readings of adolescent poetry seemingly lifted from anime scripts (“For heroes, there are trials”), a half-hearted indie cover of an obscure R&B track by Jeremih, and a painfully loud punk band whose lead singer wouldn’t last five minutes at a suburban bar mitzvah, let alone on Park Avenue.

Yet there’s a calculated shrewdness in Doom’s variety-show structure. If nothing fully coheres, if every moment feels like a pose, if you find yourself scrolling through 10-second clips of a three-hour performance that feels strangely insubstantial—well, that’s contemporary culture for you. An endless, ambient stream. A constant, unstructured drift. This fluid, formless aesthetic—what literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has described as the age of “immediacy”—reflects our technological and economic disarray. And as you instinctively reach for your phone, you become part of the performance’s quiet surrender.

Yet, buried within the bleakness of Doom, there are glimpses of a significant artist approaching a breakthrough. These emerge subtly at first, woven into scenes from Romeo and Juliet, the quintessential story of doomed youth. Imhof reverses the play’s chronology, beginning with the lovers’ tragic deaths and working backward to their fateful meeting at the ball. The famous balcony scene unfolds atop an Escalade, streamed live to the Jumbotron via an iPhone. (Later, there’s even a clever nod to another Romeo and Juliet adaptation: a recreation of West Side Story’s opening number, all thrusting arms and sharp-footed kicks.)

These Shakespearean echoes—familiar to any American schoolkid—hint at a move away from mere aestheticism toward actual structure. Like Doom, Romeo and Juliet is a tale where love is drowned in violence—specifically, the violence of social division, perpetuated by a failing ruling class. In both works, youth is fleeting and reckless, offering no real solutions. “These violent delights have violent ends,” warns the Friar. For Shakespeare, as for Imhof, the future does not belong to youth alone. Imhof, now 46, knows this.

Instead, hope lies in art itself. And in Doom, art finally breaks through in its final act, shifting from disengagement to the disciplined rigor of dance. Around the two-hour mark, under the Jumbotron, ballerina Devon Teuscher delivers an unhurried, melancholic solo—one of the evening’s first moments of real substance. Soon, a full corps de ballet takes the stage, fragments of Bach and Balanchine surfacing amid the chaos. For a brief, exhausted moment, the masks of cool detachment slip away, leaving us face-to-face with what art can—and cannot—achieve.