Fame and the Masses

This Tuesday in class we discussed the quote “In the future, everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame” by Andy Warhol.  Most adults in the United States have heard at some point in their lives heard someone having “their 15 minutes of fame.”  There are so many of these little clichés within our culture and cultures all over the world that to stop and really think about them is interesting. Who is credited with this quote and when? What was the intended meaning when this was quoted?  How does that his intention differ from how we use it today? What does it really mean to our culture? Is it something we really believe to be true or something we just say? 

Andy Warhol was a great pop artist and commercial artist known around the world. His pieces were able to reach the masses in a way others couldn’t.  He is a man that I greatly admire and I find his work inspiring.  But what his intentions were when saying this, I really am not sure. Because he was known for reaching out to the masses it leads me to believe that he was talking about fame in a large scale way.  At the time technology like the television and telephone were advancing which in turn was connecting the masses like never before.  Thus, I would believe Warhol intention was that everyone would have large scale fame. 

However, I feel that today our culture interprets this slightly differently.  Fame and be defined in many different ways.  Fame can be good or bad, local or international, for days or decades, etc.  What fame means is different for every person.  So while a person can be considered famous with the masses by getting on a reality show or becoming a You Tube sensation, one can also gain fame by being a local hero for helping a hurt child or becoming the first person in your family to graduate college.

Reaching the masses in a way Andy Warhol did in the mid 1900’s is so much more common today and we really don’t realize the scale of it all.  What this is showing is that not only to the definitions of words like “fame” change over time, but concepts such as mass media and pop culture can also change.  Thus, it would be hard to truly define these concepts that are so broad and changing in meaning.  We can do our best to put a simple definition to these but ultimately, these concepts mean different things depending on the time, person, culture, place, etc.