Is Britney Spears a performance artist or descendant of Midget City?

What fascinates me…our fascination with celebrity…so the other day (last Thursday, January 31^st to be precise) I was flipping through channels and saw that MTV had a headline for Breaking News. I paused to see if perhaps it had something about the Democratic debates since MTV likes to see itself as political and -full disclosure- I don’t watch much MTV not being even near their target audience…but no, their breaking news was an overhead shot of a car with 12 police escorts and a grave announcement by the MTV eye candy that “Britney Spears is being escorted to the hospital…” And immediately I began watching. Not because I care about Britney per se, but because it suddenly struck me as performance art. And that Britney and Paris are perhaps truer performance artists than the likes of Karen Finley or Holly Hughes…but on further reflection I’ve decided that they –and all the celebrities we follow on the internet like mice in a laboratory- are historically speaking the “children” of the midgets of Coney Island.

 

In his book Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas writes about Lilliputia, the Midget City of Coney Island which was a community built to live in the amusement park full time as part of the spectacle 100 years ago. “Within the walls of the midget capital, the laws of conventional morality are systematically ignored, a fact advertised to attract visitors. Promiscuity, homosexuality, nymphomania and so on are encouraged and flaunted: marriages collapse almost as soon as they are celebrated; 80 percent of newborn babies are illegitimate. To increase the frisson induced by this organized anarchy, the midgets ae showered with aristocratic titles, highlighting the gap between implied and actual behavior.” This description could easily be describing what has become known as “celebrity culture” and the internet and 24 hour news cycle is our own Coney Island where we live vicariously through the (mis)deeds of others. It’s good to remember that this fascination isn’t new or unique to our age…although the ease of voyeurism is…100 years ago you had to go out to Coney Island or physically be present somewhere to witness something. Now from the safety of our homes we watch the shadows dancing on the walls…