Anthony Haden-Guest the NYC Village Halloween Parade.

The author at the parade. Photo by Colleen M. Delaney, C. 2026 cdfc, Facebook: @Colleen M. Delaney 

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST, November 6, 2026

One of the unexpected differences I found upon moving from London to New York relates to the end of life. In the UK, people die. But in America they pass. Indeed, tell a New Yorker that somebody died and you may get a bleak look. That said, it’s absolutely usual to see skulls being used as design features in the US and to read such insights as a text from the Architectural Foundation which exulted that “Stunning skull decor offers macabre elegance year round.” Artists have, of course, made well-known images of skulls, such as a painting by Lucas van Leyden, an Albrecht Dürer drawing and For the Love of God, a 2007 sculpture by Damien Hirst, this being a platinum cast of a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, which was priced by the artist at $50 million and which I understand remains unsold.

Which brings me to a New York event, the NYC Village Halloween Parade. The first of these was in 1974, and it has since become one of the world’s more remarkable examples of such events, indeed the biggest Halloween Day parade in the world, and it is an outstanding example of multiply generated experiential art. It is also unlike any other. Mexico’s famous Day of the Dead, for instance, focusses on families and their memories of who they lost, the performance element being the telling of affectionate, frequently amusing anecdotes about the departed. It became so popular that Days of the Dead are now celebrated in many other cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Prague.
 

Photo by Carla Gahr.

The NYC Village Halloween Parade is not as family oriented as that, but it is a warm event. This year’s parade was called Body and Soul and the morning before I joined it had been tranquil. Indeed, here’s a photograph from that morning taken by Carla Gahr, daughter of the great photographer David Gahr, who worked with Bob Dylan, Miles Davis and John Lennon and whose portrait of Janis Joplin appears on a 1970 USPS USA Forever stamp. The Carla Gahr photograph is ebullient, the promise of a positive Halloween.
 

Photo by Colleen M. Delaney, C. 2026 cdfc, Facebook: @Colleen M. Delaney 

So I and the photographer, Colleen Delaney, took off for the parade. This was headed by Firehorse, a get-together of life-size puppets created by Julie Atlas Muz, a performance artist who has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and Basil Twist, who is an artist/puppeteer and a MacArthur-anointed Genius. We began marching on Canal Street and 6th Avenue, heading for 18th Street. I was one of 80,000 costumed marchers, my own discreetly flashy costumery being a sequined gold tie, and we moved on through a crowd of watchers reported to be two million strong. Some of the marchers were creating continuous performances, both singly and in groups, and above us floated the work of puppeteers which included dancing white-painted window frames, sculptural abstractions, floating forms of fish, animals and innumerable floating humanoid figures. These last were so deftly controlled by the puppeteers’ invisible wires that what we saw was uncannily convincing, whether it was replicating the natural movements of a body or indicating a humanoid’s mood. It was good to see such a blossoming of experiential art.

Death, moreover, that great American unmentionable, was the dominant message of the clothing and sometimes of the make-up on a face. There were plenty of pix of skeletons and skeleton parts, yes, but skulls were dominant, and these were strikingly rendered, but not in the manner of the whimsical skull decor available online. Colleen Delaney’s photographs of the skull imagery that we saw on the Body and Soul Parade can confront death in ways that come across as savagely celebratory, but fun stuff they absolutely ain’t.