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Fifteen Minutes: The Cultural Significance of Fame. Com 325/625 Ron Bishop, Ph.D. . Was Warhol Right? . “ In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” - Andy Warhol, 1988. The Octo -Mom. The Duggars. Lindsay Lohan. The Situation and Snooki. The Kardashians.
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Fifteen Minutes: The Cultural Significance of Fame Com 325/625 Ron Bishop, Ph.D.
Was Warhol Right? • “ In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” - Andy Warhol, 1988
I want to live forever… • Some say we spend too much time on our computers – we don’t get to know our neighbors. • 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, 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…
A soundtrack to your life? • Saturday Night Fever, maybe?
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.
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.
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.
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 her own 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 • 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.”
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… • Images become a kind of currency – they mediate our relationships. • A celebration of our participation in a world of consumerism. • We celebrate everything – there is no scale in our activity. • Spectacle is our “chief product” – and we’re supposed to spend our down time thinking how to make more. • Can you remember what life was like on the outside?
The Frenzy of Renown • From the ending of The Truman Show (1998):
Fame Gets a Jump-Start • The steam-powered press (early 1800s). • The telegraph (1840s). • The rotary press (1840s). • The Penny Press (1830s). • Founding of wire services (AP – 1848). • Birth of reporting as a profession. • Rising popularity of photography.
Fame Gets a Jump-Start • Time and space had been conquered! • Information could be moved around – and context-free! • Information became a commodity. • Knowing about people we didn’t know became important to us – not to mention a lucrative business. • Names began to make news.
Fame Gets a Jump-Start • “Form is henceforth divorced from matter,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1859. • It was now easier to disseminate someone’s face than someone’s ideas.
Fame Gets a Jump-Start • P. T. Barnum brings publicist and publicity into the dialogue. • Source of the adage, “Any publicity is good publicity.” • Not just promoting the performers; he was performing the promotion. • Famous for HOW he created fame.
Fame Gets a Jump-Start • Great delight in observing the process, examining truth as a kind of intellectual exercise. • We end up talking more about HOW than WHY. • Pretty scattered effort until birth of PR and the film industry in early 20th Century. • The “public” as a concept is recognized; had been ignored by business.
