The Beautiful Man Pageant

In the wake of the Republican nominee winning the 2016 US election, this homoerotic Photoshopped picture was spread widely on Twitter and VK – the Russian version of Facebook.

“Putin’s dream come true,” one Russian said on VK, and shared thousands of times.

Does art reflect political attitudes? The arts writer Roslyn Deutsche seemed to think so.

As I write, the West is bracing for an alarming invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. Comparing Putin to Hitler is not a new idea or hyperbole. I don’t think it’s coincidental that shortly after the original concerns were voiced, Kremlin-friendly Donald Trump rose to power with credible evidence of support from Moscow. There has also been credible evidence of Putin’s support for white supremacist and anti-semitic movements for example in a campaign against the philanthropist George Soros to undermine his progressive support for international justice. Putin’s KGB training and education from the STAASI has often been credited for an uncanny brilliance in long term strategic planning to de-stabilize or murder his opponents. He has flexed his muscles internationally by gaining control of the internet to potentially sabotage crucial health and governmental systems worldwide. We have also long known of the solid connections between Russian and American oligarchs, such as the Koch brothers, ostentatious museum benefactors, to control the fossil fuel narrative at every possible level . Putin and pals have amassed staggering personal wealth and made Putin the premier international kleptocrat cashing in on ecocide.

Why do I write that he would sacrifice the whole world? Because by seizing the American political narrative and enlisting Trump’s fragile ego in the service of “The big lie”, he has effectively knee-capped global efforts to rein in fossil fuel hegemonies. So what do I think Putin’s endgame is? I think it’s simple to see. If we follow the money, it’s obvious that he’s happy to sacrifice the entire world to his greedy ambitions. I’m not the only one who has noticed.

What I think Putin is particularly brilliant at is identifying and exploiting psychological vulnerabilities. For example, the famous pics of his riding bareback and bare-chested, parodied in the attached image. Putin’s strategy is the product of a complex and subtle mind that knows how to set events in motion with minimal effort, few fingerprints and long-term implications. For example, I don’t think he invented COVID, but by supporting the delusional opportunism of the international Right, he has contributed to economic uncertainties that have been the consequence of misinformation about vaccines, destabilizing the west. In effect, he is competent at effecting what I call trigger points- finding small points of intervention for large landscape impacts.

So perhaps it’s worth meticulously breaking down some of the dynamics Putin taps into in this post. I will start with the elusive boundaries between what we value in our daily life, and routine thinking that we rarely question, which Putin has cleverly exploited. One corner of that thinking is in how we value work and the people who rise to the top of a heap of work (whether their own or someone else’s).

January 16, 2022, Elizabeth Spiers wrote for the NY Times Week in Review, ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With Striving’. Her argument was that the privileged amongst us scorn careerism and trying too hard. The motive, she argues is that those judgements about attitudes to work are coming from people who simply grew up with more entitlement than the rest of us who crassly try to earn money. I confess to being a life-long compulsive overworker. I confess to at times being consumed with efforts to over-compensate for feelings of inadequacy. And yet I also recognize that I am prone to elitist values. I thoroughly “get” the critique. But as an artist, I am all too aware of dwindling resources in an ever narrowing and more competitive and randomized ecosystem. The global art market, especially for women, especially for older women artists especially for those of us with an unconventional vision for what art might be is fiercely competitive for dwindling opportunities. I once asked the late rule-bending artist and personal friend, Carolee Schneemann if she thought it was possible to survive as an artist without being a workaholic. Without skipping a beat she replied, “No.”. On the other hand, Carolee was quite the party girl at times and I have learned the hard way about the advantages of resting to preserve my long term health.

There is a paradox in Spier’s observation many still fail to note. In the United States, as government support continues to vanish except for a handful of the born gilded who manage to toe the class line, in a world where working three jobs while trying to raise a family is routine for many people, criticisms of striving seem especially cruel and divisive. Compulsive overwork may be necessary to survival.

I am long past disgust with the alternate critique of those who ask for help as lazy, a word that’s color-coded.  But now that same color coding has bled over onto anyone who fails to earn (or inherit an annual income of) six figures and alongside of that critique, us “losers (with whom I identify because of my modest income)” we internalize shaming when we must overwork to survive on limited incomes, then fail to adequately care for ourselves. Those of us who miss the impossible goal of pulling ourselves up by bootstraps may see ourselves as losers and failures in the race for the survival of the fittest but eschew considering ourselves as victims of an unjust system, tying ourselves in knots of shame and, defensiveness and self-pity while the “winners” walk off with impunity. On the other hand, competition paired with the cult of individualism whose ultimate manifestation may be in what Putin and Trump share in self-representation really can be socially lethal, not to the actors, then certainly to the play. As we know, Putin really did come up through some ranks, if ruthlessly. Trump in contrast is simply a very talented con man and a tremendously useful idiot.

The term, “survival of the fittest,” did not originate with Darwin. Darwin  never set out to prove that the most resilient representatives of a species were those with what contemporary humans might consider laudable qualities, although in his seminal writing “The Voyage of The Beagle”, he certainly noted how animals vie for the attention of prospective mates with exceptional attributes. However, I would contend that for Darwin, in adaptive evolution, brute force alone is not a successful strategy of natural selection. Rather, he seemed to argue that success manifested as a consequence of the capacity to adapt to random circumstances. That isn’t to say there isn’t brutality in the struggle for a species to survive. But winning is not always most efficient strategy in a larger community of species. Darwin argues that adaptation is the most efficient strategy. Darwin wrote that the successful result of adaptation was, "Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations” but arguably that is still not exactly the same as winning, which implies a struggle for a triumphant outcome. In the same literary scientific text Darwin goes on to reference the success of “favored races”. (Cringe.)

In human politics we now know how heavy the invisible hand of the market is on the survival of species, human individuals or races that “favor” the success of the triumphant form. The market in this case, is the over-weening status quo values of anthropocentrism which confers “favor” tor the (mostly) white male wealthy capitalist supremacism. That kind of triumph precludes questioning power. Exceptional power simply overcomes resistance and preempts struggle. But as we face widespread environmental collapse, we must ask, is this efficient in the long run?

Just ask the women and children Americans “accidently” bombed in Afghanistan. Did they get a chance to struggle before they died? The thought of their casual annihilation resulting in “winners”, casts new light on the phrase “American exceptionalism”. “We” won? Was that adaptation? Did Americans manifest favor and prove exceptional? It sounds like the most dysfunctional prevailed to self-replicate. This is an unmanageable and inefficient approach to evolution. It is randomized madness. We need to recover from this madness.

The first step in any recovery process is to admit our lives have become unmanageable, that we are powerless against these forces. Then we do the next right thing, without being simplistic, which just might be to accept that love married to humility could be the only way forward to guarantee a resilient global home. It could also be how we remain subservient to a status quo when unscrupulous people are in charge. It is also useful to name perpetrators, like Putin and Trump.

I know absolutely nothing about rap music and have no idea what this video from 2017 by Mobb Deep means except it somehow both spoke to me about those young black men who are victimized by the status quo and are talented, ambitious and passionate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz5VzLz67WA.

In a just society it would be a no brainer that the young men represented by Mobb Deep, Prodigy and Havoc, would have a shot at the brass ring (s). These particular young men might have survived, thanks to persistence, luck of the draw or raw talent, thrived and grasped that brass ring but many more do not. Prodigy died in a medical accident in 2017, the same year they released “Survival of the Fittest”, and Havoc was last heard of working on a new album in 2019. Is there a subtext to be gleaned from that history? Since COVID, I have been among the white audience who have been forced to come to terms with the brutality, depth and virulence of that inequity. In the profiles of young men dramatically murdered by white policemen in the past two years, it has become painfully clear that the survivors in this culture are not the most fit.

There are many ways to pull out a gun and they all privilege might over right: big white men, big white men with big guns; mean white women; the most lucky; the most aggressive, rich, ruthless, privileged, entitled or greedy. Are these adaptive qualities? As an abusive ex-partner once said to me, “violence works”. But does it work in the long run?

I don’t romanticize Indigenous peoples but in many cases, they do seem to get some basics right, for example referencing their place in a world as part of a common “family”, which includes all other biogeographic entities from bunnies to boulders. There is strong social censure for people who hoard more than their fair share of resources. In many Native American tribal cultures I’ve encountered, greedy behavior, or pushing oneself forward at others expense, might be considered the height of rudeness and short-sightedness. It is also the no-brainer strategy of all totalitarian dictators.

Arguably and mostly anecdotally, the artworld and academic worlds witness some of the most pernicious and amoral competitions for resources. The art world market has been described as the most bizarrely unregulated system in the world, evading regulation. The same year Mobb Deep recorded The Survival of the Fittest, a post popped up in Quora by Brian Farley indicting academia. It’s hard not to conclude that most culture producers in this culture are prey.

And yet particularly in the sciences, there is a recognition that a practice of generosity and a trajectory of attribution can enhance any researcher’s work, even when it might be selective and exclusionary. In both the sciences and the arts, the attributions simply tend to reify whomever is already the most famous in the fields to steal some limelight from the stars for one’s own glory. This leaves out a lot, for example how many people know that the late Odile Crick, wife of the renowned geneticist and Nobel Prize winner Frances Crick designed the illustration of the original famous double helix? I happen to know that because Odile was in my life drawing group in San Diego in the eighties.

There is such a thing as healthy narcissism, characterized by a healthy ego, capable of being open and transparent with manageable insecurities grounded in normal human vulnerabilities. A classic symptom of unhealthy or malignant narcissism, is that people are unable to share credit or be generous with others, for example to give systematic attribution to how ideas evolve. Endless self-help articles recount the dangers of extreme or toxic narcissism https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/narcissism-symptoms-signs. Some writers speculate a crossover between toxic narcissism and toxic masculinity. I would argue that much Western education molds students into a culture of narcissism, rewards self-centeredness, greed and rampant egotism and fosters the most ruthless competition. The golden boy or girl is the “winner” who takes all the chips. These golden winners are preferably literally born golden blond.

The grown up adult golden child is reified and celebrated as the beautiful hero, the redeemer in a world where it’s acceptable to presume everyone else is the loser and reify the “winners”. Today, the pattern of reifying the “beautiful man” repeats across demographics. There are black, Hispanic, trans, Asian, female/feminist and Native American (have I left anyone out?) beautiful men who are “winners”, tromping forward over the bodies of their mortally wounded and famished colleagues to grab that elusive brass ring. Reifying winners at the expense of the 99.9% of “losers”, who couldn’t adequately practice workaholism or make the right connections or piece together enough opportunities to “get over” is ultimately as scary as those predators who perceive the world they must exploit to survive as beautiful oppressors über alles.

Why might it be so scary to the dominant culture to share with a generous and humble heart or embrace someone who represents a democratic ideal? It has seemed to me, for example, that nothing is taken from an artist who gives credit for inspiration to colleagues. It seems like a no brainer that if we want to survive as a species, we all have to work together right now, not just the dominant race or species. There is nothing more tedious or numbing to me than someone who can’t stop bragging about their personal successes. Call me crazy but I think we can all own our own strengths and celebrate each other’s successes without elbowing out our neighbors. Empathy and cooperation (not the same as “nice”) births more resilience than a totalitarian society. But perhaps it does require some more people stepping up to blow whistles on those who refuse to be swayed by empathy.

Do I sound self-righteous about these matters? Let me assure you, I have the caught the virus of self-centeredness and suffer as profoundly from this illness as anyone with COVID. I know I have internalized these values even as I struggle to push back against the infection. I want the rescuing white knight as much as anyone. I will even volunteer to be a white knight!  A mindless yearning for toxic heroes and romantic fairy tales, for brass rings and exorbitant praise is ubiquitously endemic in the very air we breathe for most of us. We all inhale. But redemption from anthropocentric egotism might still be possible. The first step in any recovery process is to admit our lives have become unmanageable, that we are powerless against these forces. Then we do the next right thing, without being simplistic, which just might be to accept that love married to humility could be a way forward to a resilient home; another category of hard work. The trick it seems is to work hard but often in community and always in a spirit of generosity and openness. Ambition doesn’t preclude generosity or determine a totalitarian, fascist world. It DOES seem to demand an attitudinal change. I have much to learn from indigenous cultures, but they can’t teach me to “win” in this culture which requires a six-figure income for worthiness and entry into the echelons of the status quo. I don’t earn six figures. I work incredibly hard to achieve a very modest five figure income, for which I am perceived as a failure in the great race for adaptation and survival. My culture aggressively shames  anyone who fails to achieve six-figure incomes. In the arts, this is without any regard for how cultural workers are exploited and cast off. Is that a winning for the survival of the fittest. Really?

I keep coming back to the power and problem of persistent fairy tales: the white knight on horseback (or two riders bare-chested in the trope of Putin and Trump) coming to save us, the beautiful wilting princess (of any gender) in pink prom dress ready to be rescued. This is not a cooperative or world saving narrative. In the hands of Putin and Trump, however, it has become a high-art collaborative project that is vastly successful in accruing illegitimate power and instating malicious systems. But arguably their project is also something for artists to study as effective strategic thinking. What must we study? How to build an international narrative that changes the world? How can the strategic swords of tyrants be beaten into plowshares?

Is it hyperbole to compare the Putin-Trump alliance to Hitler? Not if we tote up the casualties from climate change and ecocide, which has immersed the whole planet in consequences of the sixth extinction.

In the artworld, we have famously lionized figures like Pablo Picasso. We now know his ideas came from many sources. We also know something of the human toll of his practice. Success is complicated. More and more research has been detailing how in the long run a cooperative and caring culture trumps totalitarianism or charisma for resilience and adaptive evolution, for example to fight catastrophes such as we’ve seen with COVID. It just requires a long view: unto the seventh generation and a recognition of interdependence which is reflected in other biological systems as much as other, non-dominant cultures. That is, however, a view of interdependence and success that precludes competitive individualism and menacing actors like Putin and Trump. It also precludes art stars of any kind. Leaders, yes, but not tyrants.