Where Fame Comes From?

Most systems have some sort of currency. Market economies have money. Cells have ATP. The fame game has attention. The currencies are often taken for granted; I don’t think why I can exchange a sweaty handful of bills for a sweaty handful of Bud Light–I just do it, and all is well.

In fact, it’s sort of unseemly to talk openly about currency in itself.  Talking about jobs among friends, we pass off money as a tangential factor: “The money’s better, sure, but I’m really excited about . . .”

So it is with attention.  We don’t say, “Gosh I enjoy staring at hot babes (dudes, cars, gadgets, whatever)”–in fact, in those cases, we don’t even say anything.  The reaction is internal and, often, unnoticed.

The name for a big pile of money is wealth; a big pile of attention is fame.  The difference is that people have spent a lot of time studying how money works.  One can, for example, get a PhD in economics.  When it comes to attention and fame, though, we act as if there’s some sort of alchemy that happens.

Really, though, fame comes from attention, and attention comes from individual people–from you and from me.  It’s time we start analyzing how people accumulate our valuable attention.

jamie lynn spears and penis enlargement pills are very similar

Celebrities are wealthy, generally speaking.  I got to thinking, though: how do they get that way?  The answer is obvious for certain classes, for example, socialites.  They inherit money.

Some other celebrities are well-paid for their work: think movie stars and Damien Hirst and certain other well-compensated artists.  This makes sense.  If Will Smith is an actor that America wants to pay to see, then the studios will pay him well.

Then there are the celebrities that initially stumped me, namely, recording artists.  The music industry is famed for taking a huge bite out of record sales, so it seems unlikely that someone like Ashlee Simpson could accumulate wealth through that route alone.  In fact, it seems clear that in many cases it is endorsements, magazine cover deals, and things like that that generate income.  In other words, for certain celebrities their marketable skill is getting attention. (see image)

My provocative theory on this is that these people, whether through attractiveness, salacious appeal, or representation of a potent cultural myth, operate on people like attention grabbing headlines or spam email subjects–they turn heads.

as always, Paris Hilton will play the role of “control”

There are lots of ways to put this, but most simply, she didn’t have one, or a little less simply, she wasn’t aware that she was playing a game at all. Had the imminent spotlight been on her mind, maybe she wouldn’t have been taped posing questions about the vice presidency we asked the first or fine, maybe second time, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

An ill-managed Fame Game does not, however, affect exposure; in many cases, it increases exposure. After all, every grizzly head, glamour shot, bloody caribou, and pregnant teenager carries with it an inherent number of media attention points. So that’s nice. More US-based internet search traffic than Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Michael Phelps and Barack Obama combined! The question, of course, for Ms. Palin becomes whether she can detract from the ridiculousness and redirect the attention towards the overarching mission of her beliefs to one day become richer, less gift in our laps blog fodder. It’s a lesson in quality over quantity and in sustaining after the spike.

Step # 1. Lose the banana clip. And from there? …

or, more approprietly, “a front”

At the recent This World is Yours party, we asked 5 photographers to create images designed to make us think and see beyond the noisy propaganda that penetrates so much of the modern media. Did it work? Sources say yes. When thinking is contextualized, people think! However, what happens when you remove context and catch people off-guard with an image on say the Internet or, even the streets.

We asked this question in commemorating Coup d’Eclat’s 2006 Whitney Biennial stunt on an Egyptian cotton T-shirt OR, as some have seen it, by putting a hot chick doing drugs on a T-shirt and attempting to sell it far and wide—you choose. While the artistic implications of the shirt would not be apparent to most passer-bys, our hope was that the irony and the bigger story beyond the image itself would be.

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