October 15, 2024
The origins of “famous to 15 people”
“In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
People seemed to like that when I wrote it in my 2002 book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined.
About ten years later, someone (sorry, I don’t remember who) pointed out that that phrase had in fact been first written by the Scottish singer and writer Momus [wikipedia], in 1991. Momus’ article that the phrase captions is especially insightful since it was posted before the Web created a plausible way to route around mass markets.
The page that currently houses Momus’ original article traces the history of Momus’ article:
This essay, written by Momus in 1991, was published by the Swedish fanzine Grimsby Fishmarket in 1992 then in the daily paper Svenske Dagblatt in 1994. Obviously a hardy perennial, it was then broadly paraphrased by trendy French magazine Citizen K in 1996)
I wasn’t aware of any of these and had never heard the phrase before I came up with it independently. When Momus’ prior use of the phrase was brought to my attention maybe ten years later, I blogged about it. But now I can’t find that post. So, since the origins of the phrase came up again today in a post by Dennis Falvy, I thought I should refresh the Web with this acknowledgement.
And if you want to know more about Warhol’s original saying, The Quote Investigator is, as always, worth reading.
