Worthlessness is seriously undervalued nowadays. So little is it admired, in fact, that wherever we find it we root it out and replace it with something more estimable. Consider the shore of the ocean: Less fertile than inland locations and subject to difficult, even destructive weather, it's a hard place for humans to support themselves. Until about two centuries ago, therefore, we pretty much avoided it, except for small, backward communities of impoverished fisherfolk. Nobody with the means to live elsewhere had anything to do with the shore—it had nothing to offer but misery.

But at roughly the same time as this great nation was founded, romantical Europeans began to discover a value for the shore precisely as a wild, dangerous place. If you should feel suffocated in the effete culture of your hyper-civilized city you could travel to the end of habitation and expose yourself to bracing, difficult conditions exactly unlike your pleasant, comfortable, genteel, and accustomed situation. The shore had the power to refresh by its perpetual demonstration of the inhuman All.

A few people discovered this refreshment and found it valuable; they recommended it to those of their acquaintance who might also benefit from it, and who in turn did likewise. Visiting the shore came to be a popular, entirely uneccentric thing to do; the increasing number of visitors required lodging and other facilities; facilities grew more civilized so the visitors wouldn't be uncomfortable and eventually they became resorts.

And now we go to The Beach, the most comfortable place in the world. The coasts are rimmed with unbroken lines of snug houses and fabulous hotels; we ride the waters on individual gasoline-powered water-riders, and in the evenings there's a Fuddrucker's for every taste just five minutes up the road. We go to The Beach because it's more comfortable than our civilized places; we go there not for stimulation but for relaxation in a place where no demands at all are to be made on us. The Beach means Fun; The Beach means Sport; The Beach means a style of attire and implies a kind of physique. As a hostile waste the shore provided mental freedom: Everything back in the town was constructed, construed, and identified; the meanings were all given, and participation in society required acceptance of them. At the shore there was chaos, indeterminacy, and emptiness; any meanings you found there were your own, and no one else's preexisting claim could gainsay you. Now The Beach is our common Paradise—we all know what it means to go to The Beach, what there is to be done there and why you would want to do it. The Beach is the shore domesticated and recast in our image; that means there's one less thing in the world which is not us, one way out the fewer. What once provided great value precisely by its worthlessness has been rendered priceless and universally sought-after.

This is a great shame, and a loss to us all. Other wastes remain, but like the shore, the good ones are all rapidly crystallizing into Real Estate. We suffer a similar loss, to a greater or lesser extent, every time an actor becomes a star, a style becomes a fashion, or a band becomes a phenomenon. Remember the bands you liked before they were cool? They were just what you were looking for back then—then they got big, and before too long you had to give them up because they were no longer doing what you needed. What happened?

Sometimes it does happen that someone's later work might cast unfavorable light on the earlier stuff, making it retroactively worse. Take Talking Heads: I'd been enjoying them just fine until out comes "Burning Down the House" bearing suspicions confirmed by "And She Was," and suddenly Remain in Light was less fraught than before. Likewise Robert Altman—hardly the most dependable of directors, but Three Women had always thrilled me and I liked The Player a lot... until Short Cuts came out (friends who saw them in reverse order mostly never liked The Player at all); Prêt à Porter really gave one pause, and I regret very much to say that The Gingerbread Man casts a serious pall over the man's whole oeuvre.

What happened? Did Altman and Talking Heads "sell out," taking the Chili Pepper path into corporate employeedom? Maybe, but "selling out" requires one to have had some sort of original intention—no matter how primitive—that is later compromised for unrelated goals. You can't call it selling out if you got cozy with an artist simply because they're more unobjectionable than the majority—which is certainly positive but is less than a plus—and later when they're beset by popularity the subsequent overexposure reveals that really all we have here is a failure to aggravate: The Breeders sounded great for a while. Or maybe they happen to deplete their store of useful things to say right around the time they get noticed—diminished content brings increased unobjectionability which always is an aid to popularization: They were Devo. There's much more petering out out there than selling out.

Wrong connection made, non-connection revealed, all out of connections; common ways to lose an edge. But you don't have to fail on your own merits; you really can be destroyed by popularity alone, and the ensuing loss of your worthlessness.

Anything that nobody's paying attention to is automatically worthless in the cultural marketplace, like the uninhabitable shore: Because it's not visible, desired, or claimed it can't be referenced, exchanged, or applied. This has nothing to do with the thing's "merit," however determined; this only means that for the purposes of the informational transactions which are cultural activity—which are, in fact, the culture—the unattended thing does not exist. As far as I know, for instance, nobody has any interest in the food eaten by the Berbers of the Sahara. There are no Berber restaurants and no books of Berber cuisine, and because of this you can't tell someone they're as sweet as tar'gobbuleh and you can't title your novel Ankabahs Are Not the Only Fruit. Not around here anyway—we won't know what you mean. For us, Berber food is worthless.

Instead of having cultural value, an unknown thing has only intrinsic qualities, which are just what early discoverers of the thing will prize. Until someone finds and begins to share them they remain the currency of a null nation.

But once found the thing will begin to have a cultural worth as its appreciators convert those intrinsic qualities to applied values: Five dollars is worthless until you decide to apply it to the purchase of your lunch—at which point it becomes worth five US dollars to you—and so is They Might Be Giants' feckless romanticism until you find refuge there from the milling specters of all your failed relationships. Feck-less romanticism, a quality, will simply sit there inert until you adopt, mimic, pervert, or co-opt it to your own ends, which might be the delights of plain appreciation, the stimulus to produce a work of your own, or the rumble of a business proposition.

Now each beauty being fabricated in each eye of each beholder, on being confronted with an unpopularized thing to appreciate, what you'll see there is the intrinsic qualities in it that are the most salient to you—whether anybody else thinks those things are there or not—and to those you'll attach application values according to your needs and situation and understanding; that's as it must be. You won't necessarily be "right" about what you find—your discoveries may or may not match anyone else's ideas about what's there, including, if it's art, the creator's—but if you can find it, that means it was, in at minimum some erratic, potential way, there to be found or invented.

With the application values in hand you'll be able to use aspects of the thing as cultural coin when you want to exchange related ideas with like-minded people; from the incomprehensible totality of the object's full existence you will have extracted a few bits of tradable meaning. When an object is in this condition of cultural availability—after a couple of Berber restaurants have opened but before review-readers everywhere are screaming "Don't you just LOVE Berber cuisine??" and review-writers everywhere scream back "You just LOVE Berber cuisine!!"—while the thing's popularity grows its value will rise, since it will be possible to use it for exchange with more and more people, allowing you to say things like "It's too much like L.A."; "It's like that time on Friends when the Olsen twins were stalking Ross"; "Hey, lookit me! I'm Christa McAuliffe!" You offer these tokens and anyone who subscribes to the cultural monetary system that recognizes them will quickly understand you, for better or worse.

At this early stage—which many things will never surpass—the object of attention may be widely present but is still undamaged. It has lost some of its worthlessness, true, but that has been fairly traded for a comparable amount of intelligibility. But if the thing's popularity begins to swell too greatly it may start to suffer from celebrity, the cultural equivalent of malignancy. As with biological cancers the condition may be triggered by a variety of as-yet weakly understood causes, but essentially it results when the culture's signifying machinery runs amok and begins emitting references to the thing in the absence of any specific relevance. This will all too often cause an exponentially spreading familiarity with the thing in the society, and it's at this point that the damage to the organs of comprehension begins to accumulate and communication begins to deteriorate.

Two related types of damage are suffered: one in the thing itself or among its close adherents, the other in the celebratory atmosphere surrounding it. The internal damage begins when earlier devotees of the thing notice that they're not alone. Things which support a cultural interest are taken as territory (and sometimes literally are, as when the thing in question is the cutest little beach town you ever saw) and external interest is often taken as invasion.

More and more eyes are directed towards the thing by the amok-running signals of the celebration and it experiences a significant increase in the ambient attention pressure. Although a celebrified status is often actually sought, sometimes the thing or its representatives will react to this pressure with resistance, insisting ever more vehemently on the "true" application values pertaining to the thing. "No!" they'll say; "That isn't what t'ai chi is all about." It may even be important for them to do so in those cases where the celebree is something like a religion or a nation, which holds a lot of the defenders' world-comprehension equipment. But think of all those times when you and your posse were out doing some loitering; a cop approached and your friend hissed "Act natural!" Your local reality was immediately degraded because suddenly all movement was confined to that tightly restricted little realm of Unsuspicious Behavior and directed towards the maintenance of an especially unmarked state; such a defensive posture makes continued living impossible and the only thing you can do anymore is become a flat parody of yourself.

As long as the celebree or its people maintain this condition—functionally the same as maintaining a pose—the object of adoration is dead. Anything in which people naturally participate evolves: New uses develop, new interpretations are advanced, some wiseacre juxtaposes two internal elements in a way that exposes a previously unnoticed inconsistency and fellow constituents react to that. The fans of a cherished object besieged by popular infatuation can't afford that, though; the object's natural meaning-oscillations might hit a threshold and make the thing transform into something other—an undefended martial art suddenly becomes a new form of dance, leaving all its former adherents suddenly undefined. Much better, they reason, to preserve their thing in righteous amber. They may not be able to eat their cake anymore but they sure will have it, and they can continue doing just what they're doing now forever, with no worries about the disturbances of development—which is fine if, as some do, you consider death the ideal state.

The second, external type of damage develops as the surrounding cultural medium exudes more and more undermotivated references to the object, poisoning the mental environment with celebratory, countercommunicatory noise—the source of the attention pressure the early fans of the thing have noted and taken fright at. Any mass convergence of interest will cause some degree of this, but in a case of celebrification it's combined with a high rate of value formation by parties lacking direct exposure to the object's intrinsic qualities. It can't be helped—if you're exposed to a few random headlines or an NPR story about a book, a band, a city, or a new kind of satellite cell-phone, you're going to have to make up some kind of understanding of it and probably an opinion to boot. Unbound information is unstable and seeks synthesis; if denied at least the emulsification of an attitude it will quickly evaporate. Having an attitude is the lowest form of allowing something relevance, so if you won't go that far with it, how will you retain the datum? Why would you? As long as the signal doesn't escape out your other ear you have to think something about it, but unless you actually go read the book, hear the band, live in the city, and use the phone—which given the extreme rate of thing-presentation this cultural economy inflicts, you're just not at liberty to do—then your opinion will be ignorant and you are now a member of that object's audience. It's like getting drafted.

What's happened is a kind of inverse cancer: It's not that the object has metastasized and begun invading all corners of the culture, but rather that the cultural uproar system has appropriated the celebree—now a celebroma—and seeks to install it everywhere, delightedly directing behavior towards it in all situations. Suddenly ALL the bumpers demand to know where the beef is or whether you have some milk, without any grounds to justify even a rhetorical inquiry. Unless you have some idea of your own what beef you seek and where you think it should be, you have received the celebroma and it's faking your communication.

Many such out-of-control references are made by people who as a matter of professional ethics are unfamiliar with the things they talk about, such as news reporters, who call their unfamiliarity "objectivity," and they make these references specifically for other, lay unfamiliars. Frequently these references will invoke aspects of the object that don't exist at all—Hollywood computers for example give off all sorts of behaviors that bear no relationship to what's possible in a real machine, from Doogie Howser's cursorless word processor to the terrible things that happen to dear Sandra Bullock in The Net. These fantastic functions are invented by writers who don't care to understand anything about the stories they're creating; their job descriptions say nothing about sense or communication. Their function is to put out product which is effective. Reality isn't necessarily effective and so is of no necessary interest; what's effective is the message people keep hearing and have developed reflexes to, so the reporters, writers, and other imagineers are free/required to wash us over with unknowledge and misunderstanding.

This is not to say that the person with first-hand exposure to something is blessed with an experience more correct than that of anyone who only hears about it on a late-night talk show. What the person with only secondhand exposure gets is their own exactly correct experience of being told about the thing, but they very frequently mistake that for knowledge of the thing itself. This causes two errors: false belief about the thing and false belief about the experience. There's where the alienation of celebrity comes in. If I talk to you about Franz Kafka, whose work you have never read, as long you make up your own mind about what you heard me say and always remember every subsequent time you have occasion to think of Kafka that you still haven't ever read any and, since you're not me, might have a completely different opinion if you did (and that until you have read some you must never use the word kafkaesque), there will be no error. Celebri-fication helps us forget that, with constant reexposure to interpretations far removed from their source material, until the second-, fourth-, eighteenth-order chatter so outvotes the original that it becomes irrelevant and of no interest except to Experts.

With enhanced popular misunderstanding of an object comes increased misapplication of it. The fourth time you hear someone refer to some spectacular but inessential aspect of a celebrated being you will be obliged to accept that aspect as the object's Meaning, since if ever you communicate with anyone about it, it's most likely by far that this aspect will be the coin exchanged. That's why I have yet to discuss Sharon Stone without having visions of wide-open beaver stuck in my head—and I never even saw Basic Instinct! She happened to also be excellent in Casino, but that in turn you can't discuss without instantly referring to heads in vises. The actress and the movie have been decoupled from their own natures and the intrinsic qualities they might offer, from whatever real or imagined stuff it is in them that you might have found for yourself and had thoughts about if someone hadn't already done it for you. Too many extraneous impressions of them surround you for you to be able to reach the originals and make any discoveries; all other possible meanings have been lost. Even something as brassy as Sharon Stone is too subtle to be detected amidst the self-feeding ruckus raised over "Sharon Stone." What you receive—and may in turn offer—concerning any celebrified entity refers not back to the original but to a tattered Classic Comics interpretation of it.

Once the celebration has reached this pitch it's no longer the object but the celebrating culture that determines the values made available to us by the object, and in the fever of its arousal the celebration will cease to consult the object itself regarding its qualities and instead project upon it those values that the culture wants to see or have or be. Celebratory value-projection is not simply a larger-scale version of individual value-invention; what the individual does is a function of imagination—a power the culture does not have and should not simulate. You are free—and I encourage you—to find your god in a tortilla, but when the culture takes it into its reflex system to seek gods in tortillas and to say "There is no god but in a tortilla" and "It just ain't a tortilla unless it's got god," that damages both god and tortillas and directly blocks your path to appreciation of either.

And so for instance the man Donald Trump, one of the worst Great Businessmen of the American Century, pararepresented as the name and cultural token "Donald Trump" nonetheless stands for Sharp Dealing and Fabulous Wealth. It's not even that the public has been misled—Trump's various fiascoes have been covered in perfectly reasonable detail in the general press, and his stock is down, down, down the drain. Nevertheless, when talking to someone you don't know about economic greatness Trump will serve very well as your icon, and it's because of this that PepsiCo has employed him in a recent ad for their Pizza Hut restaurants despite the fact that his accepting the assignment means he can use the money. The strength of celebratory misapprehension is such that it easily overcomes self-contradiction.

For this reason it's impossible to do anything with respect to the celebrated without being mistaken. Even right here in this article, if I refer to Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger they'll come barging into the argument flexing their machismos, throbbing their bravados, and reeking of natural heroism in complete disconnection from their realities as "actor"/restaurant-owners. Indeed, it wouldn't make sense for me to bring them up for any other reason. The reason I describe them as restaurant-owners in the first place is because the contrast between that petit bourgeois business activity and our common understanding of them as Action Figures is funny. You know what I mean. I know you do. There is no escape.

No mercy, no quarter: The disassociated ubiquity that brings celebrification also means, logically, that the celebrated value and interpretation of an object won't just tend to but must become the best known, and that these will be required readings for intercourse in the general community. In order to speak at all we have to all agree to agree on the meanings of words; likewise, to act as members of a culture we have to subscribe to the set of values and meanings it has determined, even if all our subsequent activity is devoted to contradicting them. To do otherwise is to act idiosyncratically, i.e. without relation to the community. You're always free to do so, but because you aren't speaking its language, the culture can only offer you one of two responses: antipathy or disregard. If you're met with tolerance and work in marketing you may be able to impose a new value of your devising for something on the culture, but then you're once again in amicable subscription with your peers and the majority continues to rule. It's possible for specialist communities to keep special values—in the community of Big Financiers the value of "Donald Trump" is likely to derive more from his performance than from his name and may be a token representing Magnificence In Failure. When it needs to communicate with the rest of the world, though, that specialist community will have to leave that token behind. Within your little circle of friends it may be understood that Sandra Bullock is not America's new sweetheart, but outside that group you will have to acknowledge that it is she who presently holds that role and no other. Maybe you all are of the opinion that ankabahs are the only fruit, but the culture doesn't know what they are, and fills itself with oranges.

Celebrity serves always to diseducate us. As tenuous as the link between our understanding and any reality is, celebrification unfastens even that feeble fiber, and not as respectable propaganda might, by offering tasty agenda-serving lies and half-lies, but by perfect obliviousness to whatever shreds of reality are there. In a celebrifying culture real objects serve as seed impurities around which crystals of the society's hopes, fears, and other fetishes can grow, entirely smothering the things' peculiarities in a nice, regulated angularity. Eventually the separate crystals grow together and fuse into a single, glittering, rigid mass, all idiosyncrasy and rumor of idiosyncrasy deeply encased and only recoverable by destructive analysis. The original, unfettered worthlessness is almost impossible to preserve: Population growth converts the wastes, and our entertainment-lust demands fast, fast interpretive relief. Just to note worthlessness is to diminish it, and to live relevantly in our community we must in some degree subscribe to community thoughts.

Celebrity is not something that can be defeated or even avoided—it's a natural side-effect of a mass-media society—but defense is possible. All that's required is that you keep your wits about you, limit your experience and pay less attention. Avoid tourism, television news, and as many other sources of recreational information as you can. Don't read the review—just go to the restaurant and decide for yourself. Stay in your own neighborhood. Put a sign on your desk that says "Amok stops here." The celebration is everywhere, but it can't hurt you—as long as you don't believe it's real.