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Fifteen Minutes: The Cultural Significance of Fame

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 Kardashians. I want to live forever….

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Fifteen Minutes: The Cultural Significance of Fame

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  1. Fifteen Minutes: The Cultural Significance of Fame Com 325/625 Ron Bishop, Ph.D.

  2. Was Warhol Right? • “ In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” - Andy Warhol, 1988

  3. The Octo-Mom

  4. The Kardashians

  5. 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.

  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…

  7. A soundtrack to your life? • Saturday Night Fever, maybe?

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. I give you…Grover Whalen!

  11. 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?

  12. 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.

  13. And now, some more questions… • How precisely do we use these words today? • Do we overuse them? • Are they interchangeable?

  14. 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.”

  15. 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.

  16. Maplewood, NJ

  17. My Hometown

  18. The Spheres of Fame • Family/Peers • Community • Professional • Local/Regional • National • International

  19. 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?”

  20. 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.

  21. So there’s tension between… • Our public and private lives. • Our interior and exterior selves. • Egalitarian and aristocratic impulses/interests.

  22. 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?”

  23. Tricks and Gestures

  24. 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.

  25. 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.”

  26. 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…

  27. The Frenzy of Renown • By the 18th Century, acting and self-promotion abounded. • We found it easier to “author ourselves.” • The master? Ben Franklin.

  28. 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.

  29. 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?

  30. 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.”

  31. The Frenzy of Renown

  32. 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.”

  33. Debord Weighs In…

  34. The Frenzy of Renown • From the ending of The Truman Show (1998):

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