Would You Like Your 15 Minutes of Fame?

In 1968, Andy Warhol declared, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." White House party crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi are the latest pieces of evidence in support of Warhol's theory.

While this oft-paraphrased prediction sprang either from gross miscalculation involving the world's population or the number of minutes in a day, one still has to hand it to Warhol: There are infinitely more opportunities to become famous now than there were just 40 years ago.

But just because cheap-to-produce reality TV shows and the paperless infinity of the Internet have greatly increased the likelihood of an average person reinventing himself as an F-list celebrity, that doesn't mean we should all be plotting the best way to bust into the White House's next state dinner. In fact, there is a good argument that fame -- especially fame that isn't based on any sort of actual achievement -- is a bad thing.



Here's our take on the pros and cons of getting yourself in the gossip pages:

There's nothing better than being famous
-- While the drawbacks of being stalked by photographers are well documented, did you know the paparazzi will watch over a famous person's car when they pop into Starbucks for a soy latte? Or that their constant presence more or less protects our celebrities from street crime? Now you do.

-- If you're noteworthy enough, Twitter will give you a verified account. Also, women are more willing to sleep with you.

-- English poet and early-19th-century celebrity Lord Byron described fame thus: "The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little."

Being famous is overrated
-- The Internet puts marginal fame within reach of the commoner. It also, however, records all the balloon-related publicity stunts the commoner has perpetrated to capture these scraps of celebrity and makes them easily accessible for all of his contemporaries and descendants to see.

-- There is a time in every man's life when his wife goes all Jack Nicholson on his Cadillac Escalade, causing him to suffer mysterious injuries. But unless that man is unlucky enough to be famous, few will care to learn the inevitably embarrassing details of why his wife snapped.

-- It's pretty clear that a requirement of being nouveau-famous is that you have to dress like a complete douche. How else can one explain Jon Gosselin's wardrobe?