Everyone Will Be Famous for 72 Hours
There was a popular cultural phrase coined (supposedly) by Andy Warhol that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” He referred to it as the amount of short-lived time a person, whether a celebrity or not, will become a headline in the media. The phrase was published in a 1967 Time magazine article where Warhol figuratively noted that this happens often in celebrity culture. Though it was more of his way of briefly explaining the transition of where modern society was heading into during that era of the 1960’s New York art scene. At the time of this interview, Warhol was in between building locations for his studio The Factory and he had just then ventured into producing an avant-garde band called The Velvet Underground. Bob Dylan was also the biggest music act having debuted with an electric guitar on a live stage at the Newport Music Festival in 1965. The contemporary arts scene was dominated by Pop Art, Minimalism with big names such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Yayoi Kusama, Donald Judd, Diane Arbus, Willem de Kooning and Ellsworth Kelly. The art world had become experimental, large and conceptualized beyond a canvas.
The arts, music and fashion scenes from New York to London were changing at a rapid speed. As we have learned in the present day, when three power house industries such as the art world, music and fashion excel so rapidly, everything else changes in a matter of minutes. Warhol’s infamous expression eluded that mass media and consumer culture could make for fleeting notoriety for the average person, a celebrity, politician or other public figures. For the very first time, fame was for the taking, by anyone.
In the year of our blessed 2026, the fame whore will rear its ugly head with even more divisive manners with the help of a Judas technology, AI. Granted it all began with the rapid growth of social media as it ransacked our mental health into a pick me culture, which inevitably will be rerouted into misunderstandings. The years before the 2020 pandemic, people of all ages, backgrounds, major sports players, models, celebs, studio heads and everyone with a Twitter (by Jack Dorsey) account and before Karen was let out of the gate, all were open for ridicule or heightened celebrity-dom for something awesome they said (“damn daniel” is one), a wedding dance routine, and even kittens. Yeah, kittens just being kittens also had their 15 minutes of fame thanks to YouTube.
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