How Publicity Makes People Real.

The article reports on how publicity makes the people real. The author aims to describe a mood that all Americans have lived with, the mood of broadcast intimacy. This occurs in the haze of euphoria that is the very element of the media and that only the artist informed by irony can hope to convey. Remarks of artists who have been close observers of American mass culture are also presented. The success of publicity, not the going public but the making public of oneself is to merge the private with the general conception of who one is. Market research and politics share with the media the assumption that anyone's life may have to be coaxed into publicity.