Pinnacles of Beauty

If the ancient Greeks had invented Wheaties, they might’ve been inclined to put star Russian gymnast “Sexy” Alexei Nemov on the box cover. Or Studio City’s gold medalist swimmer Lenny Krayzelburg, he of the chiseled jawline and the torso worthy of replication on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

For the original Greek Olympians, athletic virtuosity and physical beauty were inseparable. To revere one was to revere both. And as anyone knows who has watched them excel in Sydney this month, Nemov and Krayzelburg are not only superb athletes but also buffed golden boys custom-made for this era of instant mass-media idolatry.

But would the ancients likewise have honored the regal U.S. sprinter Michael Johnson, the coltish Belizian American runner Marion Jones with her megawatt smile, or the rivetingly sensual Svetlana Khorkina, Russia’s self-dramatizing diva of the uneven bars? Alas, even with Socrates around to advise them (and without Bob Costas), the Greeks and their cultural heirs weren’t enlightened enough to endorse any ideal of beauty that wasn’t staunchly Greco-Roman and exclusively male. The classical Greeks practically invented the notion of the muscular, mathematically proportioned male body in motion--as opposed to the static, more androgynous art of the Egyptians--and their concept set the Western benchmark for beauty well into the Renaissance, says Lee Hendrix, curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and coordinator of last winter’s museum exhibition “The Body Beautiful: Artists Draw the Nude.”

Well, so much for old Grecian formulas. Now that Miss Universe pageants are deemed sexist kitsch, and most Hollywood filmmakers prefer hip irony to the studied glamour of stars and starlets, the Olympics have become the planet’s premiere showcase for the appreciation of human beauty in all its multi-hued, dual-gendered and many splendored forms. We’re not talking mere “sexiness” here, the hormonal depth charge generated by today’s frisky celebrities. We’re talking the properties of beauty which gratify not so much the libido as the eye and the mind--those “intense, ordered, humane, exultant” qualities, as art critic Arthur C. Danto has written, that dignify and uplift all humanity.

The beauty on display in Sydney is, like the athletes themselves, all over the map. It’s the muscly, compacted intensity of Japanese marathoner Naoko Takahashi; the marsupial quickness and ease of Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, with his size-17 feet; or the gap-toothed geniality and dreamy self-possession of Thorpe’s Aboriginal teammate Cathy Freeman. It’s the heroic bulk of American super-heavyweight lifter Cheryl Haworth, the centaurlike synthesis of man and steed between U.S. gold medal equestrian David O’Connor and his horse Custom Made. Unlike classical Greek beauty, this beauty is quirky and asymmetrical, nonacademic and mutable.

“We’re seeing a kind of polymorphous or variable beauty” at the 2000 Olympics, says Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography and deputy director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who remembers that when he was growing up in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Mamie van Doren personified the gold standard of American pulchritude. In those Cold War days, Olympic contests between U.S. and Soviet women were inevitably framed as “our blond bombshell versus the Russian babushka,” Sobieszek says. However, athletes were judged less on the basis of beauty than national utility, like refrigerators or nuclear missiles. What mattered above all was one-upping the Evil Empire.

Pointing to the example of runway fashion shows, where it’s now routine to see a Ugandan model striding alongside a French, Brazilian or Polynesian peer, Sobieszek says that international beauty standards have “gotten a lot more pluralistic over the course of the last half century.” Like the concept of nationalism itself, which the modern Olympics still venerate despite their professed goal of universal brotherhood, the concept of beauty as a restrictive club open only to certain ethnicities or body types seems increasingly irrelevant to the 21st-century world that is symbolically taking shape in Sydney.

Of course, the Olympics always have been a showcase not only for beauty but for the ideology of beauty, for beauty’s role in propping up a power structure or advancing a set of political, economic or other beliefs. When the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made “Olympia,” her thundering four-hour homage to the 1936 Berlin Games, she was not only glorifying the human body but, wittingly or unwittingly, bolstering Nazi propaganda aims. Hitler’s hopes of demonstrating Aryan athletic superiority at the Berlin Games were shattered by Jesse Owens’ now-legendary victory.

Ann Chisholm, who teaches communication studies at California State University, Northridge, says the old Cold War rhetoric of Olympics past is “breaking down, but it’s still interestingly alive in a lot of ways.” It’s also habitual to project presumed national character traits onto the bodies of individual athletes. “There’s a lot of reading backward, saying, ‘Here is the nation, these are the Russians, they’re elegant, they’re very balletic’ or whatever,’ ” Chisholm says.

Yet nowadays, she notes, the job of defining beauty falls not to politicians or artists (who generally aren’t much interested in human beauty anymore) but to the fashion/mass media commercial complex, which depicts and markets beauty to a global consumer audience. Beauty may no longer be an impersonal Cold War commodity, especially now that athletes from formerly stoic Eastern Bloc countries have learned to flash their emotions and flirt with the crowd as routinely as their U.S. and European counterparts. Instead, Olympian beauty today helps promote the international fitness industry that has flourished since the late 1970s. Beautiful Olympians serve a corporate agenda designed to make Maurice Greene’s fat-free physique an object of emulation from Timbuktu to Tasmania.

At the same time, some of today’s Olympians seem to be breaking free of bodily stereotypes, says Chisholm, author of the forthcoming book “Angels and Acrobats: Genealogies of U.S. Women’s Gymnastics” (University of Minnesota Press). Female gymnasts, for example, no longer uniformly appear to be asexual waifs, in part because the IOC recently raised the minimum participation age to 16. Russia’s female gymnasts are actually wearing clips and sparkles in their hair. How very un-Soviet!

Chisholm suspects that in future women’s Olympic gymnastics “you [won’t] have 14-year-old Munchkins, you’ll have 17-year-old Munchkins, and the freakiness may be more pronounced.” But freakiness--or simply physical difference--may no longer threaten or disconcert us in the absence of a single, sacrosanct ideal of beauty.

Consider the cyborg-like appearance of a bald-headed swimmer using a black bodysuit to increase his efficiency, or a gymnast performing with a steel rod in one leg or with laser-reconstructed shoulders. Science and technology are constantly expanding and mutating what Sobieszek calls our “conception of humanness, our conception of individuality and identity.” The birth of the Special Olympics points to yet another shift in our perceptions of appearance and performance and, thus, of human ideals. So does the presence of 30- and 40-something athletes, enabled by scientific breakthroughs to transcend human frailty, if only for a few more years.

But if beauty has become multi-faceted and temporal, the 2000 Olympics suggest that beauty, broadly considered, hasn’t lost its connection to some essential quality of human goodness. In the West that idea took root with the Greeks and was transmitted through the Renaissance, but got jettisoned by artists during the 19th century. Then human comeliness was largely decoupled from spiritual perfection and beauty often became reduced to simple erotic magnetism.

“Maybe with the Olympics we do get into the feeling that [beauty] is associated with achievement--I hate to say with moral fiber, but maybe with morality,” says Hendrix, who oversaw last winter’s Getty exhibition “The Body Beautiful: Artists Draw the Nude.” “It’s maybe the last place in which we still see that today.”

Sydney is showing us that beauty still has the power to fascinate and instruct, to enliven and inspire, even when it’s no longer etched in marble for eternity.