Pushing the Orange Button
Dispatches from inside the blender.
In 2000, ten little goldfish in Denmark sparked a big debate on animal rights, cruelty, and limits of artistic expression. For his installation, Helena, at the Trapholt Museum, Chilean artist Marco Evaristti placed each of the ten goldfish in a separate blender. The cords of the blenders were plugged into the wall, leaving the goldfish at the mercy of the passing gallery-goers who only needed to push an orange button to liquefy the creature swimming around inside. Two attendees would succumb to this cruel temptation and two fish would meet their gruesome end before the plug was pulled on Evaristti’s installation, sparking a flurry of international press coverage and controversy.
Everyone alive today was born into a world without coherent, consistent criteria for what is good art. You would have to be at least 111 years old to have attended the New York City Armory Show as a newborn, the first major modern art exhibition. Over the past century, our criteria for artistic significance have been reduced to the piece’s ability to shock, traumatize, arouse, offend, repulse, or disturb us to the point that we cannot erase the artwork from our memory.
Until a few weeks ago, I thought I had forgotten about Helena and those poor goldfish sacrificed to the cynical sensationalism of the 21st-century art scene. But something about 78 million Americans pushing the voting booth button to reinstall the orange menace Donald Trump reminded me of the fingers that pressed the orange button to end the life of the little goldfish looking out at them through the other side of their plastic blender aquarium. On November 5th, the boredom, the numbness, the disassociation, and the alienation of the average American voter led them to make a choice that would stimulate their senses, break the monotony, and reaffirm their power to make an impact on the world, even if innocent lives would have to suffer in the process. Cruelty is the point of voting for Trump, as liberal pundits like Adam Serwer are fond of reminding us, and cruelty is the point of killing goldfish to make a statement about human nature while boosting your art world prominence in the process.
If the majority of American voters wanted a gory show from their presidential pick, Trump has not disappointed. Like his chain-saw-wielding Argentinian compatriot Javier Milei, Donald Trump enters the Oval Office not with the intent to build up our government but to chop it to bits. With each Cabinet appointee announcement, Trump flaunts his desire to throw our entire federal government into the blender, push the orange button, and shred the structure of our society to bits. RFK Jr. has gotten the nod to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, an anti-vax crusader overseeing public health just as avian influenza virus is being detected in raw milk sold in California health food stores. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead our national intelligence services, has met secretly with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and has appeared on Russian news stations controlled by Vladimir Putin. Elon Musk, co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tweeted his intent to “delete” the Department of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an organization charged with protecting the banking system against contagions from risky assets like dogecoin, Elon’s favorite cryptocurrency, which served as the immature inspiration for the name of the newly-formed department Musk will run with Vivek Ramaswamy. Before getting the nomination for director of the FBI, Kash Patel expressed a desire to use America’s most powerful law enforcement organization as an instrument of retribution against Trump’s enemies in the government and the media. The shocking picks for Trump’s Cabinet betray his desire not to run these agencies effectively but to run the federal government as we know it into the ground.
Even though these cabinet picks could mean doom for America, they are a boon to news organizations eager to report the latest Trump-inflicted outrage. 21st-century media, both traditional and social, is not much different from the avant-garde art scene, judging value not by the content’s ability to uplift or improve our world but by its ability to provoke, arouse, agitate, and disturb us. In the same way that Trump’s rise was fueled by reality television, social media algorithms, and obsessive coverage by both liberal and conservative cable news, the gruesome outcome of the Helena installation did not happen without coaxing by the media desperate for a sensational story. Attendees of the Helena installation noted that “the numerous media representatives who were present…virtually encouraged the visitors to press the button in order to initiate a scandal.” Whether in the world of politics or the world of art, cruelty is a surefire way to generate notoriety, clicks, views, and revenue.
In the wake of the gruesome Helena installation, much of the media-driven debate revolved around comparing the death of the two goldfish to mundane acts of cruelty we fail to recognize in our economy and society. Was the instantaneous death of the goldfish in the blender any crueler than the fate of lobsters picked out of a seafood restaurant aquarium to be boiled alive? What about the experience of factory farm animals whose lives are nothing but prolonged suffering and cruelty? Why all the uproar over the blending of goldfish when hundreds of Americans suffer the agony and indignity of living the remainder of their earthly existence on death row?
The moral equivalence arguments defending Evaristti’s Helena installation parallel the rationalizations of swing voters who decided to “push the orange button” for Donald Trump on November 5th. Trump’s tariff plan threatens to raise prices, but is that any worse than the persistent inflation from 2022-2023 that the nation suffered under Biden? Sure Trump is prone to nepotism and corruption, but is Trump pardoning Charles Kushner any worse than Joe Biden pardoning his son Hunter despite his repeated promises not to? Trump might tout a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy but will gas and oil companies even be able to top the record-breaking extraction they enjoyed under Biden? Wouldn’t Trump’s bombastic America First isolationism save more lives than Biden’s liberal interventionism that continues to flood arms into the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts without the slightest roadmap to peace?
I find these moral equivalences excusing the vote for Trump as unconvincing as the moral equivalences justifying the Helena installation. The incidental cruelty of Democrats pandering to oil companies to get unprecedented carbon reduction funding passed and the casual cruelty of Red Lobster does not equate to the sensationalistic, unnecessary cruelty of Trump and the Helena installation. However, a danger for Democrats arises when they feel the need to signal their seriousness or toughness by mimicking Republican cruelty in their ill-conceived attempts to woo independent voters. From Hillary Clinton gleefully joking about the brutal murder of Muammar Qaddafi that plunged Libya into anarchy to Barack Obama boasting about promoting fracking and oil drilling to Kamala Harris’s pledge to make the U.S. military the most lethal fighting force on earth, Democrats are all too eager to demonstrate their willingness to push the blender’s ON button and inflict suffering, just in a manner more dignified and calculated than their Republican adversaries. Two losses to Trump in the past three presidential elections should teach the Democrats that if voters have a taste for cruelty they will go with the most sensationalistic and flamboyant brand of cruelty the political world has to offer.
If Marco Evaristti thought art installations like Helena would raise our consciousness of cruelty and guide us toward a kinder way of life there has been little to show for it in the evolution of culture over the past quarter century. Similarly, the media moguls and journalists who profit from sensational content must admit that they were delusional in thinking their obsessive coverage of Trump’s cruelty, stupidity, and corruption would be effective at all in thwarting his will to power. In an attention economy, shocking cruelty pays not just for those who inflict cruelty but also for those who broadcast it and discuss it. Cruelty is the point because cruelty sells. Cruelty was the point of a blockbuster reality TV show that allowed Americans to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching hopeful contestants being told “You’re fired!” by a crude billionaire. Cruelty was the point of allowing that same billionaire to generate profits for Twitter by spouting unhinged conspiracies about the birth certificate of the country’s first black president being fraudulent and global warming being a Chinese hoax. In an American society where cruelty is the point of so much economic activity and cultural production, it is no surprise that the cruelest of politicians has reclaimed his position as the most powerful human being on earth. As long as there is notoriety and wealth to be gained by placing your finger on the orange button, the kinder and gentler souls in this world will be as vulnerable as goldfish swimming around the plastic confines of a blender.