Category: Theory

I like the concept of Warholism. The term draws on Andy’s dictum that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”and I guess we’re now living in the future.  One area that intrigues me is the extent and the way that Creatives such as Warhol and PK Dick, plus Theorists such as Baudrillard, Debord and Lyotard foresaw Today, the contemporary world of Postmodern Capitalism. What gets me, is when I experience something, and I think the tendency for this to happen is increased by working in Tech, and realising that this is something I’ve read about previously, that this has been predicted.

A lot of this is synthesised in the concept of the Celebrity. In the world of our nows, everyone is indeed a 15 minute famer. This concept has repercussions – what happens afterwards? Take for example this quote from Trendhunter:

“I believe that our youth are a generation who believe that they will indeed have their 15 minutes of fame. Reality TV, print ad campaigns, and even Myspace have all played their part in making this possible.”

What will happen when this generation of Mimis (spelt Mimi, pronounced Me-Me!) grow up? (or will they ever grow up?). We can perhaps glimpse what this is all about by looking at ‘those what have made it’ and the spectacles they haunt. In the UK, a man who cannot dance becomes more famous for this than his legitimate and somewhat more skilled ‘real job’. And then of course we have the other endless parades of TV-reality, where A-List slebs mix with has-beans and seemingly random members of the public to create an endless PK-Dickean panto of the absurd.

For instances such as Sargeant’s there’s a good deal of over-salted postmodern irony at play. What then, when it comes to more premeditated valence? Take Paris Hilton.

According to Trendhunter again, Paris engineered her celebrity status. She did this however in a very 2.0 way:

“She never really talked about herself. She talked about other people. She would mention the designers of her clothes, the club she was going to, who made the sweater for her dog, all without any guarantee of any return. She just threw out links.”

& thus they flocked. This is of course now a largely historical narrative. I think there’s an unsaid that it is unsustainable. Paris as performance can only endorse so many shows.

So what next, do we face endless Devolution? In the next post on this topic I’ll muse on the possibilities. What I’m wondering around is the possiblities and identities of a knowing social media, one which has re-established itself, so that we’re no longer on a journey without blogs, but one where, as Lilia Efimova notes, at least some of the directions have already been recorded.