Paris Hilton is Michaelangelo

I don't know what media aestheticians have to say about this. But reading about Phil Ochs and his association with the Yippies reminded me that they were pioneers of a media art form that had nothing to do with using media like broadcasting and video to simulate their real-world incarnations and everything to do with using the media themselves, unmediated except by their big-money gatekeepers, to make political or artistic statements (never mutually exclusive categories). So let's give it up for Angelina Jolie and Johnny Cochran and Madonna and Paris Hilton. The short-term artistic goal is get noticed at all costs. The extent to which you can rivet the attention of thousands of otherwise disengaged, alienated people with your antics over an extended period of time is the real art form of the past twenty years. And the best part of it is that it's both so perfectly capitalist (let the market set the rewards!) and so perfectly punk rock (monkeywrench the oppressor!), so perfectly modern (impossible without broadcast technology from satellites to the Internet) and so perfectly ancient (creating meaning associationally, largely visually/preverbally).