Look Ma, No Hands

Andy Warhol once claimed he never said that everyone has their fifteen minutes of fame. What he actually said, he insisted, was that fame lasts fifteen minutes. The latter is probably a lot closer to the truth, at least as a metaphorical observation on the nature of celebrity. The word fame comes from the Latin fama, which is strictly translated as talk but means something closer to "idle chatter." Either way Warhol said it, taken in this light he had it right. The mistake is to think of fame as something to be desired, when in fact it just means that you are briefly, whether literally or metaphorically, a subject of gossip, often mean-spirited. I thought of this as I was watching The American Idol the other night, which is akin to watching people in the Coliseum being ripped apart by lions. In pursuit of fame, the delusional subject themselves to the demeaning demands of waiting for hours and hours in a cattle call in hopes of about fifteen seconds of public flogging, without ever understanding the degree to which they're being horribly, abusively used. And then, unless you're that boy who was so unbelievably, over-the-top dreadful that he had his full "fifteen minutes" of notoriety (with his own website), you're gone, cast back down into the flaming hell of ordinariness.

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