On Rocky, Looksmaxxing, and the Wannabe Strongman
However, if we favor immediate legibility and populist appeal without the guidance of deeper discourse or public programming, we risk unintentionally celebrating harmful ideologies.
Originally published onSpace on Space SubstackOriginally published on Space On Space — June 4, 2026. By clancy philbrick.
WEIGH-IN
Everyone who has visited Rising Up: Rocky & the Making of Monuments can clearly see the exhibition's ambitious swing at unpacking the movie-prop-turned-statue within the context of power dynamics, pop culture, and civic mythology. Although some of the conversations feel like feints more than jabs, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is clearly relying on street-level populist imagination for its cognitive hooks.
As guest curator Paul Farber more openly notes in his podcast, The Statue, the deeper problem is what happens when the wannabe strongman and wannabe underdog get to write the hero story. Built on bravado and idealism rather than nuance, it tends to be clunky, solipsistic, and conveniently blind to the actual marginalized figures in its midst.
UNDERCARD
Racial power dynamics play a major role in the exhibition. Wall texts name early boxing contests as "often entangled with systems of exploitation and exclusion, including enslavement, and, later, the precarious lives of the working class, immigrant, and newly emancipated Black communities," and the show highlights the massive shadow the fictitious Rocky Balboa (white) cast over the real-life Joe Frazier (Black). Yet, in a sport dominated at the championship level by BIPOC fighters and white owners, Rising Up glosses over the real origins of prize fighting in the USA.
MAIN EVENT
When the Rocky statue was placed within the walls of a museum, a work of art was invented from a movie prop, asking questions about the underlying system by which "art" is chosen or deemed worthy. Something I appreciate is that, by moving from the street onto a pedestal with 'do not touch' placards, the exhibition asks us to objectify the statue itself. It leverages the schematics of museums — of ethnography and of anthropology — to flip the gaze onto Rocky, a buffed-up white strongman.
In this way, Sly reads far more Trumpian than the curators would like to acknowledge. And this is the blatantly problematic part of centering Rocky and Stallone at the same time that a golden statue of Trump, publicly defended and praised by Trump himself, is being erected.
POST-FIGHT ANALYSIS
One of the curatorial wall texts in Rising Up notes that a boxer's value was demonstrated through violent sacrifice, endurance, and struggle. Unfortunately, with limited versions of masculinity presented to our youth, these are the same benchmarks many boys and men use to measure their value and self-worth. The exhibition still runs the risk, particularly for those who may not be paying close attention, of normalizing or ironically minimizing its intended target into a position of even greater strength.