The Moronic Inferno

Meanings, pt. 2: a crisis of prevailing values

by Michael Tracey

It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite

The Moronic Inferno

The absence of that fullness and completeness, the startling lack of mature judgment and cultivated taste, so prevalent in much popular culture, is very much suggested in the fact that by some bizarre alchemy of the times JonBenet became a celebrity and remains one - which begs yet again the question of why. How did a dead six year-old child become part of what Sean O’Hagan has called the “moronic inferno that is contemporary celebrity…”? As ever, the answer is both simple and complex: simple because it’s clear that people like and need celebrities; complex because of the complex intertwining of psychology, culture and personal biography that feed that need.