‘Do You Know How to Pony?’: The Messianic Intensity of the Sixties

Abstract

At a time when the ‘hit’ show, single and LP are called Fame (an instruction manual, and of course, pace Ziggy and Sheena, a self-fulfilling prophecy), you might consider that the idea is in the forefront of public consciousness. Paradoxically, this may be so at a time when it is at its most devalued, in traditional terms. Warhol’s famous curse has seeped through avant-garde theory into popular practice: as the ritual repetition of the electronic media accelerates into gibberish, then so do those ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ contract. Yet the spell is not broken: the inertia that keeps aloft so many of our institutions, both political and cultural, also keeps the demand for (super) stars constant, even though the social and economic matrix which fostered that particular demand may well have disappeared for ever. Indeed, in a time of monetarist hegemony, our Olympians are chosen for their collusive, bland qualities (fiscal is redacted into spiritual contraction, and any residue channeled into that most obsolete form of worship, patriotism). The secularisation of our daily life is virtually complete: hegemony is a ‘fight for survival’, our current heroes merely a vacuum in an airless room.

This article first appeared in ZG, No. 8, 1982.