Covid as a Rothko Painting
How we can understand the elite obsession with covid in the same way we understand modern art
If you pay any attention to the social dynamics of progressive upper-middle class strivers and their social satellites, one of the more interesting developments is the way in which belief in covid as a deadly plague has become a marker of a certain upper-middle class respectability. In some quarters, it has risen nearly to the level of a godless religion, with masks and vaccines as its sacraments. This is more than a little unusual given what we know about the psychology of political alignment. As Johnathan Haidt points out sensitivity to disease tends to be more of a preoccupation of the political right than the left. With covid, however, it seems like the opposite is the case. Conservatives generally seem to view covid as either a scam, a minor nuisance or something to cynically play along with for votes. In contrast, reactions to covid amongst progressives tend to make Bush-era hysterics over Islamic terrorism seem tame and reasonable. How do we explain this bizarre inversion? I believe an analogy to modern art might illuminate the problem.
First things first, most modern art is a scam. When not it’s part of some convoluted tax evasion or money laundering scheme it’s used as a medium to sell a particular kind of social prestige to social climbers. I believe the artist Mark Rothko was a particular innovator in this field. If you ever read ‘American Psycho’ in your edgy teenager phase, you might have noticed that Rothko pieces recur again and again throughout the book as a must-have item for any status-conscious New York yuppie just like your Versace suits and your Ralph Lauren polos. Rothko was less of a brand than an artist. What made this possible was the fact that Rothko continuously painted the same damn painting over and over again in different colour schemes, thus enabling him to be sufficiently prolific that every Wall St broker could afford one whilst being recognisable enough to allow every artless yuppie to pretend he was a sophisticated patron of the arts.
The natural question that any genuinely curious person is this: How exactly did this shameless hack get away with it? I believe the effect is twofold: Imagine you see this kind of painting in an art gallery. If you’re a certain kind of neurotic, insecure mediocrity1 then you’re going to immediately feel terrible and stupid for not getting it. You’ll think that there must be some kind of brilliant, transcendent meaning that your pathetic little brain just can’t grasp; it’s hanging at MoMA after all. It is precisely this failure to grasp the nature of the “art” that will motivate such a person to vigorously defend such a painting and hold the hoi polloi in contempt for failing to see it. Any less might expose the neurotic as the imposter he believes himself to be and, God forbid, just another member of the filthy hoi polloi. Concomitantly, arguably the most distinctive feature of the western upper classes is an extremely self-conscious desire to differentiate oneself from the unwashed masses; in a socio-economic environment where success is increasingly determined by social connections over ability, this is vital. In this context, it’s easy to see that the success of artists like Rothko is not in spite of the fact that your average plumber sees through them but precisely because of it. To pretend to enjoy such art becomes a marker of status, an indicator of a small-souled desire to sublimate one’s own moral-aesthetic judgement2 in order win social favour and climb the ladder. It goes without saying that this kind of pliability is especially useful to powerful people with questionable ethics3.
So what does all this have to do with covid? Quite simple, early on in the covid days, it became apparent that the disease was wildly overhyped. While certainly dangerous for the elderly and morbidly obese4 there were no bodies in the streets, no overflowing of hospitals and little of the chaos and morbidity breathlessly predicted by so many epidemiologists and other public health hacks. It was at this point that I noticed that the same people who were more than happy to downplay the severity of the disease when there was genuine uncertainty about the nature of the virus suddenly decided that covid was the new black plague and that even the slightest gesture of skepticism was a deadly threat on par with actual violence. It was like a phase-shift. One suspects that it was precisely the contrast between the doom-and-gloom predictions on tv and social media contrasted with the rather unimpressive showing in reality that drove elitist covid histrionics to such dizzying heights. In the minds of such people, the foolish proles who believed the evidence of their eyes over the party were beneath contempt. Exactly the kind of person who ought to be shunned, condemned and certainly not given a cushy job at an NGO or in the public service much less given any generous government grants.
While this is certainly far from a full explanation of the manifold complexities of the covid affair, I think it’s fair to say that anyone who has ever been even slightly peripheral to so-called “elite” circles has seen this kind of dynamic play out over and over again. From this, we can clearly see that, in much the same way that hanging a Rothko in one’s apartment marks one out as the kind of ambitious, faux-sophisticate hack that would gladly cut a few corners in your M&A for a shot at high society, that distinctively pretentious “concern” about covid, manifesting in forms like outdoor mask wearing and pretending to be “super worried” about the new covid statistics, is primarily a social performance intended to distinguish oneself as exactly the kind of person willing to play along with all the bizarre lunacy that seems to characterise our current ruling class. In this sense, we can understand covid histrionics as a kind of audition for membership in the Outer Party
The kind that triple-masks and quadruple-boosts because of course they do
i.e. people with one foot in the grave