Fifteen Minutes: Everyone Will Be

In 1968, Andy Warhol wrote a quotable quote. His words appeared free-standing, without explanation, in the catalog for his Oslo exhibition. His comment on fame--that everyone would achieve fleeting notoriety--became famous in its own right. Was this an ironic twist? Or maybe Warhol's point exactly.

"In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes. I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is: 'Everybody will be famous in fifteen minutes.'" About a decade later, Warhol flippantly revised his own aphorism.

For better or worse, we live in a world Andy Warhol made--where striking visuals and fluffy text create and feed desire. In 1978 Warhol said, "I never read; I only look at pictures." He taught the idea crowd that everything out there was tasty bullshit, allowing them to round out their relativism. Eat up, he said. And so giant Brillo boxes colonized art galleries, challenging the exaggerated intellects of art critics. Meaning was out of fashion.

Warhol created himself famously: He established a scene with his artwork and consumed '60s glamour with eccentricity. He patronized Studio 54 in New York City, an elite space where fame hung in the air--it was a democratizing agent that transformed everyone into a celebrity.

Warhol wasn't predicting the future; he was praying for it, creating it, living it.

He knew what he was doing. Andy Warhol played with iconography, holding up our artifacts to say that the commonplace holds as much significance as anything else in our lives. He spoke to a society afraid of meaningfulness and wrong answers. The pop artist fed an international culture weaned off of substance and onto fashion.

Andy Warhol's fame was short, cheap and ephemeral. But it belonged to the individual, to everyone. The promise of fame--cheap, fleeting--seduces all.