From Donald Trump to MONA’s David Walsh: Our soaring anxiety about status

This story is a part of the May 4 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

Pop philosopher Alain de Botton’s 2004 book Status Anxiety proved such a prescient diagnosis of the ills of the age that status angst, in the 21st century, is our new, steady struggle. The battle to gain, or regain, or
attain status, fires politics, social media, culture, the economy – even geopolitics.

About four billion voters in the United States, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, the UK and Mexico – to name a few – are heading for the polls this year, and politicians on the right will be pitching hard to constituencies angered by perceived or real status loss. Neo-populism, the most obvious expression of group resentment, is, at heart, a gripe about declining status – to migrants and other perceived usurpers – seemingly orchestrated by high-status “elites”.

On social media, the sugar hits of likes, friends and followers sweeten daily life with a status lift: a touch of impersonal love reinforced by the euphonious haptics of our smartphones. And status is nothing if not the need for love, approval and confirmation, as de Botton pointed out two decades ago.

The luxury goods market – with the value of rare commodities subject to the whims of taste and fashion, interpretation and reinterpretation – is a contest within the status game. The luxury economy is valued at $US387 billion globally after rocketing almost 30 per cent in the past four years, despite a pandemic slowdown in 2020, with low- to mid-single-digit expansion expected this year.

As British psychologist Bruce Hood points out in his 2019 book Possessed: Why We Want More Than We Need, luxury has a near-universal allure. “We are so easily impressed and make judgments based on superficial evidence, but sometimes luxury provides a psychological boost to confidence that improves our wellbeing,” he writes. “Wearing designer clothes can make us feel better about ourselves, which then becomes self-reinforcing. When we put on luxury apparel, we feel special and behave accordingly. Luxury goods light up the pleasure centres in our brain.

‘Luxury goods light up the pleasure centres in our brain … What’s more important here is the belief, not the actual luxury.’

British psychologist Bruce Hood

“If you are drinking expensive wine, not only does it taste better but the brain’s valuation centre associated with the experience of pleasure shows greater activation, compared with drinking exactly the same wine when you believe it to be cheap. What’s more important here is the belief, not the actual luxury.”

At the same time, Hood points out that counter-signalling – “when you go out of your way to signal that you do not need to go out of your way” – is also an effective way for the privileged to signal that they care nothing for their status. “It has become almost a point of honour in Silicon Valley not to wear expensive clothes or suits, but rather jeans and trainers, which signals that you are not interested in tech status,” Hood observes.

MONA founder and owner David Walsh: his next exhibition, “Namedropping”, will focus on status objects and the psychobiology of status needs.

In global politics, there is no more unnerving case of the protean power of status anxiety than Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have died because an ageing Russian dictator has been brooding over his country’s loss of empire – of status. That status works through something as trivial as luxury attire and as profound as an existential battle for nationhood – for life – suggests how deeply wired the status calculus is in the human brain.

Meanwhile, on the banks of Hobart’s Derwent River, the feted Museum of Old and New Art is preparing an exhibition designed to concentrate the mind on status, status objects and the psychobiology of status needs. The idea that MONA’s founder, owner and prankster-in-chief David Walsh might suffer status anxiety – or even status insecurity – is, on face value, preposterous. An evangelical atheist whose MONA parking space is famously reserved for “God” – upper-case G – Walsh is the presiding deity at his idiosyncratic $134 million magical mystery tour.

Yet status and its many forms are much on the pro-gambler and art collector’s mind as he prepares for the exhibition, titled Namedropping, that opens at the museum mid-June. The show is focused on the mechanisms through which certain objects, their owners and often, their creators, are invested reverentially with status. It’s about status as celebrity, iconography, fame, fortune, and – because this is MONA – sex.

BM, or “Before MONA”, Walsh had built a modest museum to house his collectibles, and called it the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities. “It looked like every other museum in the world. It was small and white and elegant,” he recalls, as we chat over lunch on a crystalline Hobart day. “And nobody came.”

Dressed in aquamarine jeans and a faded Dog Trumpet T-shirt, Walsh tucks into a truffle dish served on a vegetal table clad in mosses and herbs (some of the greenery on nearby tables at this, MONA’s The Source restaurant, has seemingly been singed by hot plates). He was, he goes on to explain, quite comfortable with near-anonymity in those pre-MONA days, and yet the fact that his museum of antiquities “looked like every f---ing museum in the entire world” clearly nettled him. “It made me think. I thought about it for years.”

It wasn’t that he was consciously looking for a status boost, but he was certainly looking to make a mark – which is more or less the same thing. “You know, I could have written a book with some wanky title like ‘Disruptive Museology in …’ (pauses) ‘… Post Urban Dogmatics’ or something,” he says with the gravelly tone of a big-talker. “It would have sold to people who buy books with bullshit titles that they put on coffee tables and never read – like me. I would have bought it! But I didn’t do it because I was starting to get a few bucks.” So he built MONA instead. And voilà, Walsh’s apotheosis began. The gambler vaulted to the status of a god in his own cosmos – or at the very least, a celebrity.

David Walsh’s MONA on the Derwent River, 11 kilometres north of Hobart.Credit: Alamy

At around the same time, Walsh convinced himself that art is more a biological than cultural phenomenon; or perhaps, more precisely, that the cultural is subservient to the biological, explained by the processes of natural selection.

An emblematic piece in the Namedropping show is a hotted-up 1977 Holden Torana SL/R 5000 A9X – a work of art for the purposes of the argument – that gets “a specific response from the right person – in the same way that if I could compose a minuet, the people who’d respond are people who know about minuets”. For Walsh, art’s ability to enhance the status of the creator within a “selective domain” – in this case, Torana enthusiasts – explains the presence and prestige of art itself, and much of its history. The fact that “all cultures practise art” leads him to conclude that art objects bestow an
advantage, in terms of natural selection, on the artist or the possessor of art. The artist or art collector, at the rawest level, gets more sex and fitter partners, and is better able to protect, enable and advance his or her offspring – thus sustaining the genetic line. “Selection pressure selects more creative individuals to reproduce and evolution creates more artistic brains,” Walsh says. Art, on this view, is a branch of evolutionary psychology.

I confess that I’m not sold, in large part because pre-Romantic-era art was more social and communal, something akin to craft, and neither the artist nor art itself enjoyed the same social status that they would today. “I think you’re utterly wrong,” he shoots back. “Everyone says that – every museum in the world has asserted that since museums became popular. Even if I’m wrong, I’ve still got a different underlying principle than every other bloody loser.”

Is MONA itself an expression of status enhancement? He pauses as if chewing on the question, before replying brusquely. “Obviously. There is no form of human endeavour that isn’t.”

Although status games in human hierarchies have their toxic dimensions, MONA’s Namedropping exhibition skews towards a more benign side. It’s more concerned with status as a form of white magic that confers a kind of glamour – a sparkle of awe, power and envy – on rare and exclusive objects. It includes, then, works from canonical modern and contemporary global stars such as Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas Struth and Ai Weiwei, through to Australian painters Ian Fairweather, John Perceval and Vincent Namatjira, all of whose work is firmly stamped with a sense of place. The show will also include the signatures of Shakespeare, Ringo Starr and Alan Turing, as well as a cricket bat owned by Walsh and signed by cricketing legends of the 1980s. It’s no longer a cricket bat, of course – it’s an icon touched by the gods. The show also takes a more conventional anthropological course with objects such as a statuette of the Egyptian god Osiris and an Hawaiian whale-tooth pendant, or lei niho palaoa.

Status rage, fuelled by growing migration and political alienation, undergirded the rise of Donald Trump and fellow populists.

Throughout his US presidency, Barack Obama referred to economic inequality as “the defining problem of our time”. But something has changed in the past decade and status, a deeper, more potent and more varied instinct – touching on culture, identity and race – has gripped the world. Money is certainly a marker of status, but in a world where Chinese-made mobile phones and smart TVs become ever cheaper, the acquisition and display of many shiny status symbols – pieces of techno-plumage – is almost universal. Those at the apex of the human hierarchy can afford to eschew such tyrannical gadgets and by so doing, signal their liberation from the enslavement of mass communication. Real status, in any event, is something that money can’t – or can’t always – buy.

For many today, status as class has been usurped by status as identity, with a deeper attunement to membership of an ethnicity, a gender, an original or long-standing tribe or group. Status is this form has become a political actor on the world stage. It fuels perceptions about the diminished social and cultural authority of one’s people – however that’s defined - vis a vis interlopers or the loathed “elites”. As an article in the April American Behavioural Scientist puts it, economic insecurity doesn’t attract people to populism so much as perceived vulnerability “in terms of a threatened sense of group position”. Hence, the hastened march of the far-right in Europe and America.

Status rage, fuelled by growing migration and political alienation, undergirded the rise of Donald Trump as well as his fellow populists in Europe Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Giorgia Meloni (Italy) and France’s Marine Le Pen. As US-based political website Politico recently reported, populist grievances have been exacerbated by the shift to a cleaner economy – a revolution that hurts traditional manufacturing and mining industries and the communities fed by them. Both migration and climate-change policies “stir the same sedimentary unease: the fear of lost status in a world where national interest is secondary to serving global – or ‘globalist’ – priorities”.

Acclaimed British philosopher and writer Alain de Botton: “We most envy people who we take to be our equals.”Credit: Getty Images

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In Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton sought to reduce the age-old, ubiquitous and increasingly potent feelings of envy and resentment to the lowly status of neurosis: “No one spends much time resenting the Queen or Bill Gates but we’re likely to get extremely resentful if we think someone just like us has moved into a bigger house or got a slightly better job. We most envy people who we take to be our equals.”

De Botton argued that status gripes flourished when “the old social hierarchies based on class were abolished” and that this happened first, and most spectacularly, in America under the piercing gaze of the French observer and analyst of the boisterous new world, Alexis de Tocqueville. Himself an aristocrat, de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and saw there “the future”. For de Botton, de Tocqueville had left an old world still structured on aristocratic principles that people “tended to accept”; in America he found “a democracy and here you could change your status according to your luck or your talent”.

The syndrome that de Tocqueville saw at work politically, though not economically, in democratic America has much deeper roots. We find a remote echo of it in the 1st-century Roman poet Lucretius, who saw into the psychology of consumerism long before the emergence of consumerist capitalism:

But while we can’t get what we want, that seems
Of all things most desirable.
Once got, We must have something else.

And the reason the products we buy ultimately fail to satisfy us, an evolutionary take on the problem would suggest, is that the urge to acquire is a form of status-seeking behaviour that fails, time and again, to fulfil its basic need. Most of what we possess doesn’t really confer status. Our status doesn’t get a lift when we buy a new set of heels, although our stature might. And that’s because status objects are always open to interpretation, which is one of the reasons that fashions change, that status signals are negated, countered, parodied, mocked, upended; that the high is always in danger of being brought low.

The ultimate proof of the malleability of status may be the status of Alain de Botton’s book. It offered an acute, penetrating and prescient diagnosis. But the phrase “status anxiety” is probably better known to many as the name of a mid-market leather handbag and accessory company. That’s something that would certainly please the mischievous mind of David Walsh: a case of name-dropping and repurposing; a book title about the neurotic search for status alchemised into a status-seeking brand.

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