The Reality Reality Show
17
someone else or coming out of the mouth of someone different in a
performance; but so, too, would I be someone different if I were using different
words to write to someone different in a different context.
One of the things that a role on TV does to a person is force that person to
be something of a star, and there are those who have criticized reality TV for
making stars of people who do not deserve it. The category of “being-famous for
being-famous,” however, makes the similar mistake of positing some true realm
of fame (and those who deserve it) in opposition to a realm of being merely
well-known because one is well-seen. Andy Warhol’s prediction of 15 minutes
was prescient. It was, much like his tomato soup can, a realization that the
collapse of the high and the low is coincidental with the collapse of appearance
and reality, fiction and truth, performance and identity. A star’s identity too,
after all, is always up for grabs.
Reality TV stars are, in some sense, like found art: the ordinary is elevated
to fame. Baudrillard writes that “[t]hose who are plucked from their real lives to
come and act out the psychodrama of their . . . problems on TV have an ancestor
in Duchamp’s [artwork]... .”15 Just as Duchamp takes something of the
ordinary and puts it on display in order to turn it into art, so, too, do “real
people” when put on reality-TV-display become “stars.” I do not want to press
this analogy too far, though I am inclined to agree that there is more than a
passing resemblance at times between reality TV supermodel Janice Dickinson
and a urinal. The point I think we must add is that Duchamp was not, in the end,
creating art out of the ordinary, but rather showing us the way in which the
aesthetic is always already at work in the ordinary even when unacknowledged.
It is the context in which we experience the urinal that makes the urinal into a
fully realized work of art. On the museum wall, it is something new—but it
never stops being a urinal, just as when it was earlier in a men’s room it was also
always already an aesthetic object. We are different things in different contexts,
yet this is precisely what gives us continuity.
Are we all becoming the stars of reality as the distinction between
appearance and reality crumbles? In his recent book on music and neurological
disorders, Oliver Saks suggests that people who constantly hear music in their
head are a new breed. Music, he argues, was, until recently, not omnipresent. In
the past, one heard musicians performing on special occasions, and the
performance itself was transitory and lost once the moment was gone. Recording
technology changed this, making music available on demand; but the iPod
changed things even more. Though Saks does not mention it, the iPod is the
closest we have come so far to providing a soundtrack to life. With earbud
speakers only partially masking the sound of the world around us, we organize
our playlists around the activities of our day and can hear the amalgam of the
world and our music. Joggers choose heart-pounding pop; weightlifters bench
press to AC/DC; the lovelorn torture themselves with songs of heartbreak.
The power to be our own dancer in the dark—the ability to create the
soundtrack to our own life—is, for some, proof of the democratizing power of