Celebrity

Some call it popularity, some call it celebrity, some call it fame. They are all pretty much the same thing, aren't they? And wasn't it Andy Warhol who first said "In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes"? Well no, not quite. Let me unpack it for you, as the trendies say nowadays.

True, that quote did appear back in 1968 in a catalogue for a Warhol exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It had also appeared after a fashion a year earlier in a 1967 Time magazine article about artistic trends in the Sixties: "Whole new schools of painting seem to charge through the art scene with the speed of an express train, causing Pop Artist Andy Warhol to predict the day 'when everyone will be famous for 15 minutes'." 

Andy Warhol

However, there are other claimants. Art critic Blake Gopnik suggests it could have been the Swede Pontus Hultén, curator of the afore-mentioned Moderna Museet, who actually coined the phrase. Then there are some who think it originated with New York painter Larry Rivers, habitué of the Chelsea hotel and godfather of Pop Art. Others still credit the photographer Nat Finkelstein, including Finkelstein himself, who insisted that he made the remark during a photoshoot with Warhol in 1966. In reply to a comment Warhol made about everyone just wanting to be famous, the photograph is supposed to have quipped, "Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy."

Regardless of the truth (or otherwise) of any of the above, Warhol by popular consensus has come to be the 'owner' of the quote - even though he seemed to deny responsibility in a 1980 interview. But unpack a little more from the annals of yesteryear and you'll find that it was an expression in use in France at least a century earlier.

The phrase "quart-d'heure de popularité" (fifteen minutes of popularity) appeared in 1821, in 'Histoire de l'Assemblée Constituante ' by Charles Lacretelle. And then there was Alphonse Daudet, who in 1879 in an article about the recently deceased journalist Jean Hippolyte Auguste Delaunay de Villemessant, used the variant "quart-d'heure de célébrité" (fifteen minutes of fame). I quote: "de braves garçons [...] ont eu, pour une heureuse trouvaille de quinze lignes, leur quart-d'heure de célébrité"; "some young fellows have had [...] thanks to fifteen cleverly-written lines, their fifteen minutes of fame".

Et voila! Popularity, celebrity, fame are all pretty much the same thing, the words interchangeable even in translation. And the rather dismissive implication all through is that they are also fleeting accolades, here and gone just like their objects. That quarter-hour though. Fifteen minutes sounds better.

Slightly ironic then that Warhol should have managed to be famous, celebrated and popular for decades, as have been many of the figures he chose to depict in his iconic pop art paintings, the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Jacky Kennedy, Mao Tse Tung, Elvis Pressley, Mick Jagger and Elizabeth Taylor.

Liz Taylor by Andy Warhol

The Hippocratic aphorism "Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή" that we know most commonly in its inverted and translated Latin form as "Ars longa, vita brevis" was supposed to mean art takes time but life is short, i.e. it takes a long time to acquire artistic skill and a lifetime is hardly enough. Maybe since the Pop Art Sixties  it has started to be interpreted somewhat differently in the sense that life is short but art endures. 

It's almost as though Warhol has pulled a trick on us in using the Pop Art medium (trashy, immediate, mass-produced, disposable) to confer on his celebrities a kind of lasting fame through the act of painting them.

Here's the first draft of a new poem (a work in progress) for today's theme.

15 Minutes

Who was it first declared

"Fame is a whore"?

It could have been 

one of the great Elizabethans

or a cynical wit of a Metaphysical

or Oscar Wilde even.

We just don't know. 

The recording angel 

was a bit hit and miss that day, 

mind probably elsewhere. 

On what to have for tea for instance 

(supposing recording angels need to eat), 

or maybe taking a sneaky

quarter of an hour

away from what it considered 

the frankly thankless task 

of keeping score about

what people say

for posterity,

in order to do a few crystal lines

in the lavatory.

Whatever the poor excuse 

for this unfortunate lacuna,

some perceptive soul

had got it spot on that day

only to remain ironically unknown,

deprived of their entitled

fifteen minutes of glory.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)