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For
once, just 15 minutes of fame: In 1968, Andy Warhol said that in the
future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes … and Andy has been
famous for saying it ever since, even though it has proven deeply false.
The reality turned out to be that celebrities became ever more tenacious
at clinging to their fame for unconscionable lengths of time.
A
nice aspect of the Olympics, however, is that it elevates all sorts of
people to a genuine 15 minutes of fame. For a moment, everybody cares
about that nice girl with the ponytail who won a medal in that … thing
… you know, the event where you jump up and down. Yeah, that
one.
And
then everybody forgets about her … until four years later when we find
out she’s making a gutty comeback from plantar warts, and we all care
again … for another 15 minutes. I like that.
Of
course, the athletes don’t want to go back to obscurity. They want to
turn their 15 minutes of fame into an entire lifetime of celebrity, like
1976 decathlon gold medalist Bruce
Jenner. (He likes to joke that on his deathbed, he’s going to hold
an auction between Coke and Pepsi over who gets to put their logo on his
coffin.) But, 99.8% of them can’t, thank God.
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