Celebrity

All prizes, acclaim, recompense, all recognition of any sort, is rendered utterly contempible, wershens on the lip of praise, stutters and stalls in the misled, reflex applause of fools. Fame is become the province of impenetrable self-congratulatory cliques to whom no talent grants admittance, sentient caricatures tainted by conceit. It is a brush whose bristles are stiffened by the unimaginative rigidity of the academy, a mind rendered barren by the sterility of uncritical adulation, a reputation that is merely a conduit for the debased currency of notorious celebrity. 

Our masters, the anonymous omnipotent gangster plutocrats swaddled in incalculable wealth on super-yachts and swanning on casino verandahs, tweaking the strings of their puppets as though strumming an untuned lyre in discordant parodies of democracy, are nevertheless unconcerned about any rebellious urge with which we lumpen masses may twitch and convulse. They have nothing to fear. They are secure from molestation, because the low standards we are persuaded to adopt as the measure of ourselves, to ensure we can mint that debased currency with the abundance of dross, enough for everyone to get a taste, mean no excellence we can ever conceive or aspire to will ever be so lofty as to penetrate their sphere, and so with our very mediocrity we achieve our own surveillance and spare them the effort.

So, if you are an artist, pray to die in obscurity. Pray for your name to be forgotten. Pray for your work to be discovered by a later civilisation after the language you speak has passed from human memory and text so that the meaning of your utterances remains forever inaccessible and obscure. Let it be the discovery of the hieroglyphics of a shattered rosetta, a palimpsest of dust. Let your labours be the very definition of futility.

No-one will ever understand you anyway, so let the degree of their misunderstanding be more extravagant than any prize. Be peerless in the extent to which you are misconstrued. Be accused of the very crimes against which you rage. Luxuriate in the lavish injustice of your execution.

Let your grave be marked only by blotches of phlegm spat upon it by generations of children taught to revile you even after your name has been forgotten and all you are is a custom of hate, a tradition of traduction. Wear their condemnation as a badge of honour. For it will at least be more sincere, more authentic, more genuine, than all the fanfares and flashbulbs that greet today's celebrity as they enter or exit whatever jungle or house the spotlight has come to rest on.