Richard Schickel
<i>Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America</i>
Ivan R. Dee
Chicago
1985

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p. 9--"Everyone speaks vaguely of the power of the medium [television]...[Yet] one is struck by study after study indicating that most of us most of the time attend television in such a state of distracted stupefaction that it has, for instance, only the most marginal effect on political contests and is mostly useful in keeping those already committed to a candidate happy with their choice... Same way with the products it advertises. ... Nor does it seem to encourage much in the way of emulative behavior."

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Richard Schickel
<i>Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America</i> (1985)
pp. 12-14

"[12]"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Susan Sontag remarks. And "There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera." Yes. And though television does not freeze moments forever, as still photography does, it has an appropriative and aggres[13]sive function. This is not serious for those who appear only occasionally on the tube. Their brief moments of exposure evaporate into air, lost in the media hum of the age. But for those who must put themselves constantly at the mercy of the cathode ray, it is a problem. They are, after all, volunteers for this duty; no one is forcing them to undertake it. Therefore people think they must like it, need it. And some do, of course.

"But like it or hate it, their lives in the public eye implicitly encourage appropriation and aggression. Even victims—people thrust into the news because they happened briefly to get in the way of history or of some lunatic convinced that he was history—are forced to endure this final victimization... When the American hostages were finally returned from Iran, a State Department spokesman was quoted in the press as saying that they "would be free either to cooperate with news organizations and <i>become celebrities</i> or to withdraw quickly into private life" (emphasis added). Most chose the latter course after submitting to the orgy of welcome that was staged mainly for the benefit of the press. In a way, it was a well-managed business, a quick, healthy venting of built-up media steam. But surely there was no choice in this matter for this put-upon group. There never really is.

"Be that as is may, since television has breached the walls of polite convention that formerly separated performer and audience, the well-known and the unknown, everyone now jostles rudely and noisily to exploit the opening in the defenses. They all pour through it, wave upon wave of journalists and pseudojournalists. They are of course abetted by modern technology. The jet plane, for example, can whisk the paparazzi to the most isolated of retreats. The telephoto lens permits the lurking photographer to sneak up on the famous, while the motor-driven shutter allows him to squeeze off many shots quickly—assuring him of at least one salable snap before the security men move in or the celebrated person pulls himself together and assumes his public face and posture. Lightweight film and tape cameras add to the mobility of the gawkers surrounding the famous.

"In recent years, as a result of these "advances," we have been treated to glimpses, through a lens blurrily, of the contours of many famous breasts. Or to put the point as precisely as possible, we have been made privy to the breasts, et cetera, of many women whose fame [14] does not rest on the display of their physical charms. For example, a former First Lady, the Princess of Monaco, even, for heaven's sake, that aged recluse, Greta Garbo. This is not to mention the many well-known actresses whose unit publicists did not control the output of their stillsman as carefully as the promised they would (or didn't notice the grip with a camera up on the grid). Outtakes of similarly unprotected moments, caughts by the motion picture camera, somehow make their way from the trim barrel in the editing room to the pages of the less respectable skin books as well. From time to time the newsstands indeed offer one-shot magazines bearing some such title as <i>Celebrity Skin</i> (which at least meets the truth-in-advertising standard). What price the frisson provided by the forbidden or the unlikely? A suggestion: a sizable proportion of the male population is constantly being reduced to the status of the preadolescent, peering through the keyhole as his sister takes a bath. And that says nothing about legitimate feminine outrage over this exploitation."

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p. 24--"our words of choice in referring to the well-known—"fame," famous," "famed"—which derive from the Latin <i>fama</i>, meaning "manifest deeds," still meant, as late as the 1940s, something like what it had meant down through the millennia of Western civilization; it was the byproduct of concrete, commonly agreed upon, perhaps even measurable, achievement."

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p. 25--"Given the state of communications and transportation throughout most of the nineteeth century, there was no way to regularly and conveniently bridge the distance between the prominent minority and the anonymous mass. Telegraphy communicated words, but not voices or images. Trains could, and did, inch their way across the country, but even actors who spent most of their lives on tour did not reach more than a tiny portion of their potential public in the course of a year, which is why, for instance, <i>The Count of Monte Cristo</i> or <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> could serve as exclusive vehicles for actors like James O'Neill and William Gillette, whose careers stretched on into our century. Reputations grew, as it were, by rumor, and by the time you got to see one of these stars you were acutely conscious that you had been given, literally, a once (or, at most, twice) in a lifetime oportunity to enter into the admired presence. It is no wonder that the reception for performers of this type was likely to be more impassioned than those we are now accustomed to. The audience was being presented with an opportunty to express the pent-up longings of the [26]years in these encounters, and so their gratitude was likely to be tumultuous—as was their disappointment if the star failed to live up to expectations. The now vanished tradition of the rotten vegetable hurled at the stage is very much a thing of this former historical moment."

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p. 48--"Of them all only [Douglas] Fairbanks seemed to have had the social imagination—or perhaps it was simply a curious nature—to see how his fame could be traded on for more than mere monetary advantage. In the 1920s and early '30s it was said that his annual trip to Europe was made mainly to line up the following year's Pickfair guestlist. But that was not a joke. ...

"Whether he consciously envisioned it or not, Fairbanks was clearly experimenting with the creation of an international fellowship of the accomplished, a multinational celebrity community that was, to borrow a phrase, a sort of moveable feast for the famous. He was ahead of his time."

This notion of a "multinational celebrity community" has a whiff of New World Order about it, no? So sure, "social imagination" and "a curious nature;" also "ahead of his time," but this "time" of which he was "ahead" was not one of which he (or very many others) would have approved. "Fellowship" is such an innocent word, yet there is not only positive formation there but also, inevitably, negative exclusion. Here is the groundwork for a permanent gilded age and a total loss of empathy and relatability between the two macro-castes. And I think it is very appropriate, extroversion being what it is, to trace this back to a precocious abundance of "social imagination" in certain of the first generation of culture-millionaires.

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p. 49--"Since, manifestly, they [movie stars] could set standards of personal style...then they might—horrors!—be capable of setting standards of conduct as well."

This could explain the popular overestimation of Media Effects. On the other hand, the impact of celebrities of "personal style" is beyond dispute, and this is itself a Media Effect of a sort.

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p. 54--"...<i>Reader's Digest</i> and </i>Time</i>, both of which began in this period [1920s?]. Like the tabloids, though at a slightly more elevated level, they catered to the public [55]perception that the world had speeded up, that there was both an increased flow of information and diminished time in which to absorb it."

P. 55--"The whole was given a tone, almost but not quite, a point of view, by much-parodied <i>Time</i>style, as zippy and cheeky as anything in any tabloid, but more literate. This was said, by co-founder Britton[sic] Haddon, to have been derived in part from Homer's epic manner, very suitable for a publication that took the view that the week's events constituted a kind of epic in themselves. There was in this style a kind of omniscience of tone, a knowingness, that was reassuring to the reader.

"Yet there was a kind of youthful playfulness in it too, a sense that puns and gags, neologisms and fanciful references were requisites if the multiplicity and simultaneity of events were to be adequately—that is, catchily—portrayed to the somewhat backward reader. It is perhaps worth reflecting that around this time, in another, far higher cultural realm, a great writer had also gone to Homer for his model and was also playing dazzlingly with words while celebrating, and [56] organizing into artistic form, the quotidian. That, of course, was James Joyce. One wishes to do no more than point the parallel. And, by so doing suggest that journalism, at its humble level, was modernist too. Had to be. The search for the overpowering image, the one that might at least resolve for a moment the individual's sense of being awash in incomprehensible events and inundated by inchoate emotions, can be seen as a humane enterprise, an act of charity for the increasingly befuddled."

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p. 84--"neither Chaplin nor Bergman were then under long-term studio contracts, as Flynn and Hayworth were at the time of their derelictions. They thus had no access to the protective machinery the studio press departments provided their people, no way of walling themselves off from the ravening press.

"One cannot stress too strongly the value of the press agent's services in this regard. It was as protectors, not promoters, of images that they best earned their keep. ... They were extremely successful in quieting the doubts that arose from the frequent lack of correlation between a star's skill and his or her success. Too many people seemed to rise to the top almost immediately upon being spotted at some drugstore soda fountain. And while stories like that fed a certain hopeful feeling of identification with the lucky ones, they also fed our least-elevated, or spoiled-child, fantasies, in which rewards came to us just because we sat around looking adorable. The stress on how hard the stars worked once they had received their lucky break, and the exemplary nature of their private lives thereafter, were reassuring."

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pp. 85-86--"...the cautionary myth about how Hollywood exploited, and then destroyed, literary and theatrical talent. ... This fictive tradition is late-blooming, the first Hollywood novels having tended toward a sort of innocent bedazzlement... The business of the later fictions was to chastise the upstart film industry—after all, a powerful competitor to novels and the stage—by imbuing it with an evil, destructive power out of all proportion to the facts. Ignored in all these tales, whether romans ̀a [86]clef or not, was the <i>self-</i>destructive capacity of their protagonists. One is inclined to believe that Fitzgerald and Farmer would have ended up drunk and disorderly no matter where they worked. Similarly one is inclined to believe that the second-rank writers who insisted that crass Hollywood was destroying their delicately flowering talents, or found themselves being drawn toward guilt-ridden Stalinoid politics, were copping a convenient plea. It is perfectly true that writers, being the least expensive to replace cogs in the machinery, tended to absorb more abuse than anyone else in the studio system. It is also true that their values—literary values only erratically useful in the process of making a movie—naturally placed them in an adversarial position vis ̀a vis producers. Given these facts, and given the fact that their stock-in-trade was articulateness, it is easy to see how the self-romanticizing myth of Hollywood as an anti-Eden, a veritable fiery furnace where the artistic soul was terrible tested, and often consumed, was propagated and grew. Never mind that many talented, well-adjusted writers...found happiness and even a degree of fulfillment there, never mind that one of the greatest writers of the period, William Faulkner, uncomplainingly moved in and out of town for over a decade, using his craftsmanlike labors on various screenplays to finance his novels, which remained utterly uncorrupted by their author's Hollywood experiences. The myth was too precious to the literary community, to the middlebrow world in general, to let reality even partially contradict it."

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p. 89--"stretching still further back into theatrical history, there was the tradition of the actor-manager, putting together companies each season to tour either in the classics or some vehicle that set him (or her) off to good effect. Frequently these vehicles, generally melodramatic in nature, were either commissioned or bought up and thus entirely controlled by the star, who would often grow old in the part, without thought of any obligation to novelty or of asserting a personal or political vision through his craft."

P. 92--"Probably we are dealing with a form of what we would now call the revolution of rising expectations. That is to say, the more favored a group is, the more favor it expects. For, to put it simply, actors are, rather obviously (and at best), interpretive artists; it is a misunderstanding of their function for them to take on or fantasize a primary creative role. Certainly it is damaging to them, conceivably to everyone involved in the creative [93] endeavor, to undertake such a role. It is just here that the division of power within the new show business did incalculable damage."

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p. 117--"...John Raeburn persuasively argues that the novelist's [Hemingway's] pose as he-man adventurer at least began as a strategy for disarming his critics, to whose doubts and strictures he was preternaturally sensitive. The implication of his image—a construct of brawls, hunting expeditions, war correspondence, and might fishery—was that no man clinging tightly to his effete urban comforts could possibly comprehend him, thus was in no position to effectively criticize his work. He was, in effect, appealing over the critics' heads to a larger public, the sale of his books and his viability as a popular magazine sage, giving lie to their increasingly negative natterings... What he sensed was what people in the movies had known from the beginning, what all kinds of writers and artists would soon sense, namely, that despite all the talk about the increasing power of criticism, "The Age of Criticism" as some in the years after World War II would dub it, criticism was actually an irrelevance, or could be made into an irrelevance by a shrewd publicist. The point was to become a brand name if you could—the equivalent of a movie star, splendidly free of the finespun meshes of the theorists, free to play the game by what seemed to be your own rules."

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p. 136--re: "the fifties", "Even the arts, both high and popular, were for the most part in an as unadventurous and unenergetic phase as they had ever been in this country in this century."

This is a curious lapse. New York in the fifties rather flagrantly contradicts this assessment. Is he giving lots of weight to the rest of "this country"? But if so, when was the rural rest ever particularly adventurous vis a vis the arts?

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pp. 157-158--"To begin with, the prestige of knowledgeability instantly accrued to McCarthy. He gave the impression of having information no one—not the President, not the press, not even the sacred FBI—had. And even [158] when this or that spokesman rose quietly and rationally to defend the official record, insisting that they were attending to the matter and had turned up nothing to support McCarthy's charges, it made no difference. For the senator would be on to the next case, and the next. He had stumbled on the most important fact of life in the modern media world, the central point in Ellul's argument, which is, it will be recalled, that "steeped in the news," the typical citizen loses all sense of continuity, finds his memories of even very recent events either blotted out or distorted. The way at least a few people said it at the time was that the denial, the counterevidence, never seemed to catch up with the sensationally phrased, front-paged, initial charge. And as these last piled up, stupid people kept saying things like, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Or they simply found the rebuttals too subtle and therefore too dull to think about in comparison to the simplicity and sensationalism of whatever original charge the senator (or one of his several imitators) had made."

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Richard Schickel
<i>Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America</i> (1985)
pp. 201-203

"One must be careful, of course, not to romanticize the years when the parties were all-powerful. They were obviously prone to corruption, crudity, and compromise. But the situation now [1985] is worse. From his exile Richard M. Nixon comments with sour acuity that "television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy." But there is no doubt that television has further vulgarized the already vulgarized process by which ideas are translated into political action. By going always for the shrillest advocate of a program or policy and then juxtaposing with him its most outraged and outrageous opponent, it parodies, in a thirty- or forty-second spot, the best traditions of democratic debate. "It excludes the third or fourth choice," Adlai E. Stevenson III said, having given up his Senate seat at least in part because he no longer wished to participate in a process of this kind. ...

"He does not mention another factor, recently isolated by political scientists. It might be termed the Idiot's Delight Phenomenon. It is based on the fact that 20 to 30 percent of the audience for the nightly news broadcasts use these shows as their sole source of information about current affairs. They read no newspapers or magazines, and they represent the low end of the scale educationally and economically... We may also be pretty certain that they do not vote, since voting on a more or less regular basis is essentially a middle-class phenomenon, based on the fact that members of this class continue to take their civics lessons seriously and thus cling most closely to the political illusion. Be that as it may, Professor Michael J. Robinson, a political scientist at Catholic University, identifies the denizens of the socioeconomic lower depths as the "inadvertent audience" for news, people who, before the advent of television, were stable in their opinions and passive in their political behavior. Now, even though they don't vote, even though they are precisely the Grammy Awards audience that Vidal is talking about, they actually exert what might be called an "inadvertent influence" on political life. They are, to begin with, the least common denominator at which news programs must be aimed, for Nielsen naturally includes them in its ratings. Since like all the rest of television, the news shows are dependent on numbers for success, it is understood that this lower third must not be allowed to become bored and start switching channels. Lively pictures and pleasing personalities—that's the ticket to their contentment. So, through the years, television news drifts ever downward in its aspirations and its appeals... But if Nielsen picks up these absurdities, so do the other pollsters when they are testing the waters on other matters, and Daniel Yankelovich, the public opinion sampler, attributes the sudden violent gusts and eddies that blow through his polls to this volatile, perspectiveless mass."

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pp. 217-219--re: "The Painted Word" by Tom Wolfe: "In it he argued, with more persuasiveness than the art world could admit, that modern art, particularly atfer World War II, was created mainly at the inspiration of critical theory, thus reversing the customary order of things in the arts... as Wolfe italicized it, <i>"Modern Art has become com-[218]pletely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text."</i>

"The text, of course, is a critical text, a kind of journalism—thus a kind of publicity—no matter how elevated (and often, obscure) the prose is. The need for these texts arose, as [Harold] Rosenberg said, when painting ceased to be realistically representational and the are audience began to require guides to what they were peering at in puzzlement, could not, indeed, begin to understand, let alone appreciate, what they were seeing without these trots."

This is my first awareness of Wolfe, so I must direct my comments at Schickel. As excerpted here, the thesis appears utterly specious. It could be a joke, actually. The less representational the painting, the more it invites/demands (imposes?) literary interpretation. A paradox, perhaps, but also a consequentialist inference rather than a settled fact. Sontag could almost have written the same line, but she would have placed fault with the interpretors, not with the artists. That is the important difference. With apologies to Eleanor Roosevelt, "No one can make you feel literary without your permission." I don't doubt that the critical and business sides of this milieu were rotten. I simply choose to understand that as an indication about critics and business people rather than about painters and paintings. And thankfully, most of the people are now gone while the art and the ideas remain for us to make use of according to our own needs. 

i.e. it points to a bedrock ethical/worldview distinction, besides also pointing up some disagreement on basic facts (e.g. who had read what theory when and why).

No ritual slaughter of modernism would be complete without "understand" and "appreciate" putting in their compulsory appearances. As ever, the standard scare quotes and trigger warnings apply here. And as ever, there is no effort made to unpack the literal meaning those two words, any figurative or indirect usages they may have picked up throughout a century of art-semanitic promiscuity, or (most of all) to hold any of these meanings up against the background of this crucial moment, "particularly after World War II," and to ask whether these words in fact apply in any or all of their available meanings. Nor is it here or elsewhere ever cut and dried to say that the audience "began to require guides." It is the publicists (not that they are ever called by that name in the art world, nor is that name to be taken to imply that they are not also the artists themselves, curators, critics, et al) who first and more "require" this.


p. 218--"The rise of Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School (call it what you will) had two great consequences. The first and most obvious was that as the paintings grew ever more resistant to interpretation, interpretation became ever more important to their success—and to their sales. At a certain moment the critical article began to appear to one American art fancier after another as the arena in which unquestionable values were set. And to one American painter after another as the place in which not just his ultimate standing but his immediate future would be determined. The power of criticism, long on the rise, almost inevitably became, in this new context, a dominant power. Where once an artist hoped to please critics, it now became possible to plan one's works so that it was near-impossible not to please them—so coherent was the critical consensus and, technically speaking, so easy was it to satisfy. In short, something [219] unprecedented had happened, and the traditional order of dependency between prime creator and publicizing mechanism had been reversed.

"There were other ramifications... The first is that Abstract Expressionism is obviously the most enigmatically subjective form of painting ever invented. If it may be said to have any subject matter at all, it is the subjective state of the artist as he approaches his canvas, his arena and the "event" he hopes to stage therein."

Time out. This is just...totally wrong. "Subjective states" are non-transferable. And even if they could be transfered, the mere fact of the existence of such "states" does not mean that they rush in to fill any social vacuum where a longstanding cultural convention formerly resided. None of that is inevitable, and most of it is not even possible. If the subjective state of the artist is to enter into the artistic transaction, some social agent must have affirmatively decided to put it there. For the bulk of painting's history, this had not yet happened, and it would have been impossible to achieve. (Even "critical theory" could not have helped, but instead would have faced the same barriers.) In fact what Schickel says here really applies quite directly to textbook Impressionism, not to Modernism, and it is no coincidence that Impressionism in fact remained wholly dependent on representation. That seems a much more successful route to achieving what he describes here. But of course it is easier to bash modernism if you can ascribe positions to its principals which they never held.

[continuing]

"Thus, more than ever, our attention is focused upon him, his moods, and his consciousness in general. There is simply nothing else on which we can focus our search for meaning—"

HOW ABOUT ON ANYTHING BESIDES A PAINTING?

"and despite many variations on the thought that a picure should not mean but be, despite the yards of verbal impasto slathered over the modernist enterprise by the writers for <i>Art News</i>, people continued to ask for it. And since they could not find it in the paintings themselves they turned to the only place they could logically turn—to the artists themselves."

Listen, I know what I'm about to tell you is difficult to swallow, but when you really care about someone you have to tell them the truth. Meaning is ultimately elusive. The myriad sayings about The Meaning of Life are testament to this. Finding small meanings in small things is a necessary coping mechanism, but each find is temporary, small things are always interconnected, and the big picture is scary and ultimately unknowable. Infinite regress is a constant danger here which can literally cause you to go crazy. The unrelenting imperative to oneself and one's companions to make every action and thought meaningful is a one-way street to personal and psychological ruin. What seems an innate, bio-determined rage to meaningfulness may be anything but.

I'm concerned about you. You're talking about feeling "puzzlement" standing before a painting. No painting can puzzle you without your permission.

"If you find a bunch of well-dressed old people to be intimidating, a suggestion: maybe Mahler 6 isn’t the best entertainment choice for you in the first place." (Matthew Guerrieri, https://sohothedog.com/2006/09/25/eight-sentences-about-classical-music-id-be-happy-never-to-read-again/  )












p. 220--""the painters were luckier than the avant-gardists of literature and music. To apprehend the latter's work real concentration was required, real effort, even an educated sensibility. That may have been equally true of the Abstract Expressionists too, if you intended to fully engage with their work at the highest level."

QUITE the qualification! An indication that the distinction he is attempting to make is tenuous at best. At worst it gets things exactly backwards. It would be more easily argued that this susceptibility to transmission through the ascendant "visual culture" was a susceptibility to all the things RS bemoans; in other words, that this is the "bad news," not the "good news." Music and poetry, meanwhile, are protected from populrization (this is BOTH good and bad, of course) by their irreducibility vis a vis the "visual culture" of popular media.

"But the popular culture was becoming increasingly a visual culture, and the means were at hand—on film, in the picture magazines, in book publishing—to spread the (painted) word. Far easier for <i>Life</i>, for instance, to devote some bright, eye-catching color pages to Jackson Pollock than it was to devote a similar number of pages to the gnomic poetry of a Wallace Stevens, which would place a real intellectual demand on the reader. To put the matter simply, this art suited the ever-more-sophisticated technology of mass communications very well. As for the readers, they could, literally at a glance, get some kind of message. The worst suspicions of the simple and conservative about the avant-garde were instantly confirmed; the best hopes of the outlying culturati equally gratified."

So, to make a desperate end run around the terrifying possibility (especially terrifying to the "simple and conservative," of which RS ostensibly is not one despite his views here) that Abstract Expressionism actually has some powerful surface appeal ("bright, eye-catching color" is nothing to sneeze at, no?), the new mediums of simplification-distribution and their inherent qualities are blamed for buiding a bridge between the worst tendencies of an emergent visual culture and the worst tendencies of theory-led, navel-gazing aesthetes. This doesn't quite add up.

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p. 246--"The intervention of criticism (by which I don't mean merely the formal variety, but also the response of the intelligent audience, discoursing among themselves, in the process making a viable and healthy market for an interesting artist or a challenging work) grows increasingly irrelevant. It is, in fact, the business of marketing to subvert this process, to protect the cultural entrepreneur from the unpredictable vagaries of this discourse, to place as many cultural products as possible beyond discussion and thus, in a sense, outside of the historical continuum and in the realm of sensation. This, in turn, suits journalism, which is always in pursuit of sensation at the expense of complexity."

Taking a deep breath following the preceding gaffes, this part hits the nail on the head. Probably knowingly, RS here describes not only the parochial affairs he presumably has witnessed as a working critic, but indeed describes much that is postmodern about postmodernism: it is outside of history, beyond value judgments, reduced to sensation, etc.

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p. 270--"it is of paramount importance for the rest of us to observe the distinction between the celebrity world and the ordinary world, to insist on the otherness of the public world of public figures and to maintain, nowadays, intellectual and psychological barriers against the confusion of their realm and our private realms."

p. 271--"It would be foolish to deny that celebrity life is assuredly, and in large measure, a public performace by people roles, whether or not they are fully conscious of that fact. But except for state occasions of the celebrity world...we do not perceive this kind of performace as drama. A play is a much more tightly structured form... And, however caught up we are in the drama, we never entirely erase our consciousness of the invisible fourth wall that separates us from the players on the stage. ...

"I am well aware that the spirit of modernism and/or postmodernism is upon the theater as it is upon all the arts, that in recent times there has been a strenuous and concerted effort on the part of the theatrical avant-garde to break through the proscenium stage's fourth [272]wall. Thrust and arena staging, entrances through the aisles, direct address of the audience—all of these are but the most modest manifestations of this spirit. Street and guerilla theater represent far more radical efforts in the same direction. This revolution is stagecraft, stage aesthetics, may be seen as a practical recognition of what theater people see as a defect in their art, an inability to directly appeal to the audience's subconscious, to get in there and mess with it directly as they see film, television, publicity in its many forms doing.

"To greater or lesser degree all artistic conventions objectify and distance, and the drive of contemporary, popular art, of our public life in general, is to subjectify and render immediate all experience. Contemplative rationality does not move products off the shelves, or make anyone a star. Nor, by this time, does it suit the way most people want to live, which is to have their needs gratified immediately, their wants as soon thereafter as possible. A public figure must, therefore, make his impression on us as quickly and firmly as possible, and the best way to do that is not to brook the delays of art, if that is your field, or the delays inherent in carefully developing a complex position, if politics is your game. Indeed, the more unstudied one's image appears to be, the more naturally it appears to fit one of the several highly stylized roles that are always open in our public life, roles which the great audience never seems to get too much of."

The parallel between the calculated directness of celebrity performance and that of activist theater is brilliantly drawn. What is missing, I suppose, is a more articulate enumeration of the benefits of Fourth Wall Theater in and of itself, not just against the backdrop of the (post)modern reactions against it, in which latter case it can only be the truth which wears one robe against the lie which wears many.