MARGINALIA
Dinosaurs, the Media and Andy Warhol
Keith Thomson
History will no doubt record Andy Warhol as a major 20th century
artist. One of Warhol's "gifts" was to make everything
with which he was associated—his work, his friends, his
life—appear cheap and shallow. If he set out to irritate and
confuse, then he certainly succeeded. In the process he mocked us
and, above all, himself. Warhol will also be famous for his
pronouncement, now nothing less than a curse, that in the future
everyone will have the chance to be famous for 15 minutes.
All successful artists have to be showmen, it seems. Mozart and
Chopin were no shrinking violets. They would have adored television
unless, like those fabled old silent-screen movie stars, they had
been betrayed by squeaky voices or uncouth accents. Today, although
technical virtuosity is still a necessary condition for success as a
solo musician, charisma is almost equally important; hence all the
CD covers featuring female classical violinists in revealing
clothing, or little at all. All the more reason, then, to admire the
steadily nonglamorous types, such as the pianist Alfred Brendel, who
let their music talk for them.
Perhaps, in a modern-day version of Faustus, those 15
minutes of fame form a contract with the devil, granted through the
agency of the media, who are a fickle-enough ally in the best of
times. At a recent London film premiere, the Hollywood stars
wandered unnoticed into the theater while journalists gathered like
flies around two recent participants in a television program called
"Big Brother." Well, a plague on both their houses, we
might say. Except that the rot is spreading. Getting oneself noticed
by the press and especially by television, if only for 15 minutes,
has infected the one field where, in a perfect world, people would
be immune to cheap blandishments and hew strictly to a line of
puritan truth and detachment. Fat chance, of course, when we are
talking about science!
The "boffins" of World War II made science glamorous, as
did the late Christian Barnard, pioneer heart surgeon. German
naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and English biologist
Thomas Henry Huxley had already perfected the art a century earlier,
however, and I have no doubt that Charles Darwin worked long and
diligently, if quietly, at his "Saint Charles" image. But
perhaps nowhere have scientists pursued an often too-transient fame
further than in paleontology, and particularly with respect to
dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are God's gift to television and the
newspapers, just as science fiction is the lifeblood of the
supermarket tabloids. Tyrannosaurs and little green men—sure
winners, both.
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