In 1968, in the catalog for an exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Andy Warhol—über-dandy of the sixties—consigned one of his most famous phrases: “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Nat Finkelstein, a photographer who had taken some portraits of Warhol a couple of years earlier, was quick to declare that it was he who had originated the expression as he was taking a series of photographs of the artist on a New York street and a group of children and a butcher wanted to get into the frame. “Everybody wants to be famous,” Warhol said at the interruption, to which Finkelstein replied, “yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.” Whether Finkelstein’s commentary actually originated the expression we will never know and truth be told it doesn’t matter as this would seem to be a case of “good artists copy, great artists steal,” an expression that, paradoxically and consistently enough, has been attributed to Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner and even Steve Jobs.
Of course, by the time Warhol consigned these words in his exhibition catalog, American culture was already more than obsessed with celebrity, “but it wasn’t until Warhol that that there was a definitive of what most Americans really wanted: not only a chance to know everything about celebrities but also the opportunity to become celebrities themselves.”1.
Over the years Warhol’s quote has taken on increasingly darker overtones. In 1989, David Bowie and his band Tin Machine revived the original escenario of Finkelstein’s portrait of Warhol in their song I Cant’t Read:
When you see a famous smile
No matter where you run your mile
To be right in that photograph
Andy, where’s my fifteen minutes?
Exactly a decade later, Marilyn Manson would probe the reaches of fame in I Don’t Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me), a song that can be seen as a tribute to 1970s era Bowie:
We’re rehabbed and we’re ready
For our 15 minutes of shame
Norm life, baby
We’re talkshown and we’re pointing
Just like Christians at a suicide
By the first decade of the this century, Banksy showed a work in Los Angeles that featured another détournement of Warhol’s quote. It was a TV set painted pink with the phrase: “In the future, everyone will be anonymous for fifteen minutes,” making it clear that in the future—ours and Banksy’s present, really—we will only be able to lead anonymous and private lives for the fifteen minutes that fame was once allotted. Privacy is so strange these days as to qualify as a superpower.
Credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49006256
- Guin, Jeff and Perry, Douglas. The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005. ↩︎
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