Who has emerged to eclipse her? Where is the next Madonna, the mass-multimedia star?
I’m afraid that the great era of great stars and great personalities is over. American popular culture, which I thought was in a Renaissance, turns out to have had a natural organic shape to it, and this is its stage of decline. The entertainment industry is massive but fragmented. Video games have absorbed young people’s creative energies and diverted them away from the study or practice of the fine arts. The Web has also dealt a fatal blow to the culture of stardom because isolated types can now instantly express and exhibit their conflicts and find fellow sufferers around the world through the Web. But e-mail is evanescent. And the blog form is, in my view, the decadence of the Web. I don’t see blogs as a new frontier but as a falling backwards into word-centric print journalism — words, words, words! The Drudge Report, on the other hand, is a true product of the Web. It’s interesting how Matt Drudge still has no competitors. I used to think, how long can Drudge be king? Surely his
