Question Celebrity

Andy Warhol had it slightly wrong: In the future, everyone won't be famous for 15 minutes. They will, however, think highly enough of their own stature that for Christmas they'll be buying photographs of themselves or their children or their pets -- blown up and vividly repeated in the Warholian printmaking style, a la Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, for a couple hundred bucks, courtesy of companies such as MyDaVinci.com and many others. The Warhol prints exist in our consciousness as visual shorthand for modern importance. When the artist originally made them, they were meditations on pop icons, and, on some level, the redundancies and abstractions of celebrityhood. Before long, Warhol was actually gifting (or selling) them to the famous subjects themselves. Having Warhol "do" you in bright DayGlo and pastel became a way of showing you were somebody.

Hollywood has sometimes placed a Warhol-did-me in the home to demonstrate an antagonist's massive ego (see Sigourney Weaver's bitchy boss role in "Working Girl"). It certainly loses something when the dining room wall of a Reston McMansion features little Riley or Madison living large on a giant Warhol rip-off. Who knows what goes through the minds of people who aren't queens or presidents and yet still look at an empty room and think that what it needs most is a huge picture, or several, of themselves.

Although this column is supposed to call out the ethical missteps of the actually famous, it seems that more and more we are confronted with people who've taken on all the attitude of being a big star, without any of the justification. The cellphone helped immensely, bestowing on everyone the right to be the most important person in the room. Plastic surgery became the norm. Partying and making exclusive lists of one's acquaintances (velvet-roping the world) are how today's non-celebs spend their time. Let us amend Warhol's vision: In the future, all of us will think we are famous. It's written, or splayed, on the wall.

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Correction: In my November 5 column, I mistakenly wrote that a boutique owner, Fraser Ross, is being investigated in a computer hacking case. The Los Angeles Times article cited in the column reported that the FBI is investigating a photo agency in which Ross is an investor. An attorney for the photo agency said that Ross had no role in its operations.

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