![]() ![]() ![]() I read Kunen’s book when I was in high school and found it smart and funny, a critical judgment that I rather doubt I would be equally inclined to render were I to re-read it today, judging by the following passage: In 1969 he wrote a book called The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary in which he described his involvement in the Columbia University protests of 1968. ![]() ![]() What put these questions in my mind was the fate of James Simon Kunen, a celebrity of my youth whose name popped into my mind the other day for no particular reason. I wonder whether Warhol ever thought about that: what happens when your fifteen minutes are up? Even more interesting, what happens when you outlive your fifteen minutes by…oh, fifty years? I was talking about Harry Reasoner, but you don’t have to be, or have been, a TV star to know how fast stardom fades. So far as I know, there’s never been a TV star, no matter how big, who stayed famous for very long once he or she went off the air. It’s more like an opiate-as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent smoke. Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. (Remember JenniCam?) It’s also what I had in mind-part of it, anyway-when I wrote these words eleven years ago: That’s what Andy Warhol meant when he said that in the future, everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. ![]()
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