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ChangingMinds Blog! > Blog Archive > 14-Jun-06

Wednesday 14-June-06

Ten minutes of fame

Pop artist Andy Warhol famously predicted that we would each have ten minutes of fame, which seems quite a bargain to me.

After all, I don't think non-stop fame is all it's cracked up to be. If you look past the hygienist smile and the designer plastic of the glitterati, you'll find terrified and lonely people who hide behind minders and high-security fences as obsessive wannabes stalk the perimeters. You can't tell who you can trust either, with fair-weather hangers-on and bitchy A/B/C-List competition behind the celebrity chumminess.

Another concern is in what celebrity does to your sense of identity and hence who you are. When everyone treats you like a god it can be easy to assume that you are. Gods are all-powerful and often blindly cruel. They are also cosseted and cocooned until like a baby they can do little for themselves.

The other side of the hill must also be quite a downer. After fame and fortune, to be blanked and ignored as you slide back into humdrum is probably a profoundly depressing experience.

But a peek, just ten minutes or so -- that sounds about right. Just a nibble of that green-looking grass. Enough to understand both the pleasure and the pain. That would be interesting.

I've had my moments of notoriety and it's been fun and added spice, but thankfully I've never got close to being trapped in celebrity.

Your comments

"Fifteen fame filled minutes of the fan-zine writer" is a quote from Billy Bragg in his song "The Great Leap Forward". I was listening to this song this morning with my daughter Alice.

My test for originality of thought runs like this: Google on <$Thought> and see what comes up.
"Dimensionality of Emotion" was today's thought, and I stumbled across your site.

I am working on a collaborative project called CYC. Details here: http://www.opencyc.org/ which may be of interest to you. Please follow up the link, my intention is simply to expose the MEME of this project to a wide audience of thinking people.

I really like your site, and hope to be able to spend more time on it...best wishes

Simon M.

Dave replies:
Cool! OpenCyc looks like serious knowledge stuff. I've spread the meme to some friends who know more than me about this stuff.