The Crassness of Warhol….world famous for 15 Minutes? Another cuckoo.

When I saw the subject for this week’s LBC post my heart sank. I could not think of any aspect of this idea that touched a chord with me. I understand that I will never have Fifteen Minutes of Fame, and wouldn’t want it. I understand that it has come to represent mush in our present (supposed) Celebrity Culture. By the way, as an aside ; How can they be celebrities if they truly have nothing worthy of celebration?( Did you notice the Freudian slip? Genuine, and so appropriate that I decided to leave it as it is.)

Well, as I was saying, I could not “connect” with the subject. If fame were to come to me it should last more than a mere Fifteen Minutes. And fame for what?

A question: How many of you knew  of Al-Jaziri,  Abbas Ibn Firnas or Fatima al-Fihri ? These are people who deserve fame and yet have really not achieved it in due portion. I only learned about them yesterday when I visited an exhibition at The Science Museum in London.

This was what convinced me to try to write on this subject.

I am not a “child of the 60s”. Rather, I was a youth and young man of the 60s. My childhood was during the 50’s a period of austerity and relative poverty.

It was during the 1960s that I first became aware of what we now call Celebrity. I knew, vaguely,  about film stars as a child but I was also aware of political injustice and other issues. And , as achild, I preferred Skiffle to Rock and Roll . It was only many years later that I understood their shared roots. I digress. Nothing new in that.

We had The Beatles of course.  Celebrity writ large but I still wonder if it is really deserved any more than Mozart and Liszt deserved theirs. Apparently women went as gaga for Liszt as they did later for The Beatles. The latter are a constant puzzle to me. There were other celebrities, Mary Quant, Manson, the Kennedy brothers, David Bailey, Cassius Clay, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Green Shield Stamps …the list goes on.

The celebrity who concerns us here is Andy Warhol. A major mover in the Pop Art movement of the 60’s it appears to me that Warhol was, rather like Dali, a great self publicist. Perhaps his greatest work of art was his own celebrity. About ten years ago I was told by a nineteen year old that i should listen to The velvet Underground. I didn’t ‘get’ them the first time around and certanly wouldn’t this time. I was right.

And now Warhol comes back to haunt me with his rather crass statement that, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

In 1979 he said:

It’s the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1979) “Studio 54”