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Fifteen Minutes: The Cultural
Significance of Fame
Com 325/625Ron Bishop, Ph.D.
Was Warhol Right?
“ In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.”
- Andy Warhol, 1988
The Octo-Mom
The Kardashians
I want to live forever…
Some say we spend too much time on our computers – we don’t get to know our neighbors; don’t hang out anymore. We keep to ourselves – to the point that sometimes we actually create our own, sometimes media-driven, worlds.
We’re a bit more INSULAR, yet PRESENTATION and being public means more to us than interacting.
Fewer “common spaces” or “public spaces” where we all hang out, as opposed to our media “niches.”
We have smaller circles of close confidantes – 3 or 4, I think, down from 5 or 6.
I want to live forever…
We just don’t hang out anymore, drop in on neighbors, play pick-up games – no “schmoozing” of the non-gaining an advantage in business kind.
Maybe we’re just hopeless hams…
Maybe we truly live in a “confessional culture”…
Maybe it’s just a defense mechanism…
Some key plotlines…
Their whims must be indulged.
They make strange requests for ocelot milk and octagonal jelly beans when they go on tour.
They overwork their obsequious underlings.
They do charity work, but only at gunpoint, and only for the publicity.
They’re petty, crabby, petulant, and often disregard social conventions.
If they slip up (drugs, booze, sex), they inevitably find God – and get their story on “Behind the Music.”
They absolutely hate doing publicity for their work – but there’s Madonna and her fake English accent again, on the “Today Show” hawking a CD.
What we do know…
Possible to achieve fame for doing nothing – or doing something strange, or badly, or oddly.
Fame may be more fleeting than ever.
Can become famous just for being famous.
…or for flashing your knowledge of the famous.
…or for flashing your access to the famous.
…or for flashing your knowledge of how to become famous or teach the rest of us to get close to the famous.
I give you…Grover Whalen!
Some questions to consider…
Why does everyone seem to want fame so badly?
Why does our society place such a high value on it?
Why do the media keep telling us that society places such a high value on it?
Some definitions to consider…
Fame: the state or quality of being widely honored or acclaimed. A favorable public reputation.
Notoriety: The condition of being notorious. Being known for an unfavorable act or quality.
Renown: Widely known or esteemed.
Celebrity: A well known person. From the Middle English, celebrite; or the French and Latin, celebritas.
And now, some more questions…
How precisely do we use these words today?
Do we overuse them?
Are they interchangeable?
Back to that preliminary list…
It’s a vicarious thrill.
We’re a quick fix society.
We love achievement – in any form.
Our time on the planet is limited.
We’re really into “whatever it takes.”
That preliminary list…
We’re nosy.
We do more things in public than ever before.
We feel more entitled than ever before – part of the “Guitar Hero” culture, as Bill Maher claims. We want the fame – we don’t want to learn the chords.
Good enough and having enough isn’t enough, or so we’ve been taught.
It’s an escape. We like zoning out (but we all do it together).
It’s in your face. We’re good at that.
Maplewood, NJ
My Hometown
The Spheres of Fame
Family/Peers
Community
Professional
Local/Regional
National
International
Other Strands to Consider…
Legacies NOW!
Are we self-absorbed?
Does Donna Karan wear herown designs?
The “Barber Theory.”
We had to be taught accomplishment is cool, but what does that do to the rest of us?
This always being connected and available has its downside.
Life “by checklist.”
Whatever happened to leaving a “soft footprint?”
Consider, Continued…
Preoccupied with images, observation, dissection, deconstruction.
We watch monitors; we are monitored, become our own monitors.
Whither the unscripted moment – the “chance to do something totally unique?” (Garden State)
All this surveillance causes distinction between the observer and the observed to go away.
We may have forgotten how to entertain ourselves.
So there’s tension between…
Our public and private lives.
Our interior and exterior selves.
Egalitarian and aristocratic impulses/interests.
Tricks and Gestures
Fame requires detachment from reality.
What happens if you don’t have a “style?”
Used to reach each other with ideas – now we do it with fame.
We’re hopeless copiers.
Who are the sources for your “personality collage?”
Tricks and Gestures
Tricks and Gestures
Long ago, the camera was thought to be an intrusion.
Are there “people who refuse to be collected?”
Is it a good thing that we tell each other you can be anything?
It’s not a club anymore.
Tricks and Gestures
A gap developed between what a person is to society and is to him or herself.
But it’s only the appearance of individuality.
A contract of sorts between public and the fame seeker.
Fame not only is desired, it impacts our values.
Can’t just say “famous for being famous.”
Some Painless History
During the Industrial Revolution… Urban populations grow. More folks become literate. Printing and publishing become cheaper. More folks vote. The idea of monarchy is challenged/rejected. And then there’s the GLUT theory…
The Frenzy of Renown
By the 18th Century, acting and self-promotion abounded.
We found it easier to “author ourselves.”
The master? Ben Franklin.
The Frenzy of Renown
Preoccupation with self-definition.
The famous are always reinterpreted.
They’re vehicles of cultural memory.
You have to be famous in terms the rest of us can understand.
The Frenzy of Renown
Charles Lindbergh: A hero without tarnish.
Turned flying into a symbolic aspiration
Social mobility turned into social transcendence
It was the purity of his action!
Let us know our aspirations had substance!
Why do we get so pissed when celebs talk politics?
The Frenzy of Renown
Then there’s Hemingway…
Why are we so damned needy?
“I love to have people see us, but I don’t want to see anybody” – Ernest Hemingway.
“To acknowledge the audience erodes the purity of the heroic gesture and turns it into mere theater” – Leo Braudy.
By now, fame was a type of “sainthood.”
The Frenzy of Renown
Guy Debord Weighs In…
Society presents itself to us “as an immense accumulation of spectacle.”
All “human life, which is to say all social life” is “mere appearance.”
Reality “suffers the material assaults of the spectacle’s mechanisms of contemplation.”
Debord Weighs In…
The Frenzy of Renown
From the ending of The Truman Show (1998):
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