by Polydamas
In February of 1968, the famous American pop artist Andy Warhol made a most insightful observation which secured him inclusion in the book Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Warhol said,”In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” Then, in 1979, he elaborated, “My prediction from the sixties finally came true. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The phrase “15 minutes of fame” thusly entered into popular culture.
A related observation was made a few years earlier by Pulitzer-winning historian and professor Daniel J. Boorstin, who also served as Librarian of Congress. Professor Boorstin wrote in his 1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, that America has become a celebrity-driven society due to television and mass advertising where fame was not the product of any greatness. Boorstin defined a celebrity in his book as “a person who is known for his well-knownness”.
Professor Boorstin was absolutely right. Over the past fifty years, America — and the world following in tow — have become a society consumed with celebrities and obsessed with fame. The magazine stands are overflowing with glossy magazines dedicated to chronicling the minutest details of the lives, fashions, and shenanigans of celebrities. Armies of paparazzis, photojournalists dedicated to snapping for public consumption all available candid photographs of every private and public moment of these celebrities’ existence, feed a seemingly insatiable public demand for morsels about the new aristocrats of fame. Gossip columnists obsess about reporting and analyzing every trivial rumor, trifling innuendo, and idle comment by and about the celebrities they zealously follow.
Today’s celebrities are a motley crew of live performers, e.g., actors, musicians, athletes, and comedians, with varying degrees of native talent. However, the circle of celebrity has grown recently to include reality television show participants who are limited to only portraying their crass, self-promoting, and obnoxious selves. It also includes the current and former sexual partners (both paid and unpaid) of more established celebrities, who, paradoxically, become publicly known celebrities themselves for what is — or should be — their private sexual conduct with celebrities.
Not only do these celebrities enjoy lives of wealth, comfort, and leisure, their fame results in the well-documented “halo effect” which leads their followers to consider them far more informed, learned, and intelligent than they really are. In the same way that they trade upon their celebrity status to endorse products and services, many of the selfsame celebrities publicly support the political and social causes du jour. These causes essentially call for greater government control over the lives and liberties of its citizens, whether nuclear and military disarmament, gun control, environmental control, militant vegetarianism and animal rights, government control over all or most of the economy, and related movements to contract the sphere of individual liberty. Interestingly enough, the occasional unscripted interview will reveal to discerning minds that there really is little substance beneath the celebrities’ talking points. They tend to lack necessary critical thinking skills because relatively few of them have post-baccalaureate college degrees and many of them either did not graduate from college or their college coursework was mostly comprised of unchallenging fluff courses.
Through the eyes of previous generations, the current public worship of celebrities would have been considered the apex of stupidity. They would consider shockingly frivolous the stupendous wealth and influence that contemporary society bestows upon the modern-day descendants of the minstrels, troubadours, court jesters, street entertainers, mimes, circus performers, and gladiators. Our Founding Fathers, who fought the tyranny of King George III and had explicitly rejected the monarchies and aristocracies of Europe, would be speechless to learn that their American descendants avidly follow the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton or the lurid misadventures of Prince Harry in Las Vegas, much less the low-brow lives of the so-called stars of reality television shows and their celebrity-by-proxy groupies.
We here at The Cassandra Times predict that the days of the age of celebrity, as currently constituted, are numbered and three long-term downward trends threaten to bring the age of celebrity to its close. First and foremost, as the economic recession in the United States reaches five years and the economies of Europe totter on the brink of collapse, more serious and somber pursuits will predominate the public consciousness during the upcoming Greater Depression. When people are unemployed, starving, and in great need of the services and knowledge of real doctors, there will be little need for the fellow in a white coat who merely plays a doctor on television. In other words, the public will embrace cold, hard reality over fanciful frivolity. Playing an airplane pilot or a ship’s captain on the big screen is no substitute for the knowledge and skills of a real airplane pilot or a ship’s captain.
Second, the upcoming Greater Depression will economically cull the overflowing celebrity herd of its minor and inconsequential performers. The economic calamity will leave only the upper-tier of talent who carefully shepherded their financial resources like Aesop’s ants in the summertime for survival in the wintertime. The legendary lifestyles and conspicuous consumption of Hollywood stars will be replaced by frugality and austerity that will mirror to some extent the lives and hard times of the people.
Third, monumental technological advancements in computers, graphics, and computer-generated imagery, as can be seen in James Cameron’s movie Avatar and in more than a decade of Pixar films, will allow movie studios to produce movies far more economically using computers to replace exorbitant box office talent. Without the over-sized egos and petulant, entitled attitudes of human actors, Hollywood studios will be able to produce movies, television shows, and music videos at a fraction of the current costs and deliver them on time and under budget. The remaining human actors will have to significantly scale down their compensation levels to compete with computer-generated actors.
Thus, the frivolous age of celebrity will draw to a close.
