Half the celebrities in the world today are famous for being famous—although I guess many of them actually DO have talent, ranging from the ability to dance suggestively in yoga pants on TikTok to saying stupid things on YouTube to getting plastic surgery and yelling at each other on “reality” TV to setting up pay-as-you-play accounts that are for fans only. These are skill sets, people!
Not that this is anything new; some 60 years ago the historian Daniel J. Boorstin published “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” in which he defined celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”From Zsa Zsa Gabor to Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, there’s a long and shallow history of inexplicably well-known individuals—and one of the undisputed pioneers in that field is the cartoonishly busty, sugary blonde, pink Corvette-driving phenomenon known as Angelyne, who burst onto the Los Angeles landscape with a series of billboards in the 1980s and somehow became something of an icon, despite the fact that was pretty much it: the billboards.
