Ephemeral fame and visual e-desecration.

When you go on some artist’s Myspace page, that is, so to speak, like if you entered in his room, in a place very personal to him.

Have you ever entered in a star’s bedroom? Have you ever discovered and shared a part of his intimacy?

Yes, thanks to Myspace , to Dailymotion or to Youtube videos, that are totally available to anyone and often show unexpected parts of a famous person’s life – he or she partying, for example.

“Wonderful”, will say many people. “Very good for an artist’s career”.

“Desecrating and too much generalizing”, would answer some of Baudrillard’s admirers.

That criticism is no moral or impulsive comment: it aims at explaining some very short and dazzling fames in the frame of a new way to make oneself well-known – or notorious.

Actually, Baudrillard said that in the photographs, there was like a lack of absence, like a lack of void, like a lack of death, finally. That is to say that when you look at a photograph, you have an impression of eternity, as if reality was comparable to the fixed climax the photographer has shot at an intense moment. It only contains present, action and life, which is very unrealistic.

The notion of unrealism is very close to another: sacredness. Even if the star system is not so to speak a religion, I think that words like “idols” can make it comparable to it.

To sum up, I think that having too much informations about a person who is becoming famous, notably videos (degrading or not) and very commonplace comments made by the star on Myspace, must show that he or she is not as exceptional as we could expect. It shows the star as someone like everybody, as the sacred cloth of absence, doubt and ignorance that veiled him falls.

For example, artists like TTC, who were skyrocketing, may have shown themselves too much on the Net with videos, notably with low-quality concerts, and that may have quickened their drop.