We've found the 10 "best" listings this year, as well as their estimated price, terms and conditions, and number of bidders. (And if someone wants to get us that meeting with Harvey, we'll take it!)

Kathie Lee Gifford (Drew Friedman)

Two shows are departing the Great White Way before the competitive holiday season even begins. Onetime Observer cover girl Kathie Lee Gifford is saying goodbye to her charismatic-Christian-themed passion project Scandalous, which will have played 31 previews and 29 regular performances when it says goodbye on Sunday. It departs this weekend, allowing Ms. Gifford to return her full energies to broadcasting the famously wine-drenched fourth hour of Today each morning. 

Meanwhile, David Mamet's play The Anarchist will close December 16, after having played 23 previews and 17 performances. Audiences apparently prefer Mr. Mamet's classic work (though his Glengarry Glen Ross, currently playing on Broadway, has pushed back its opening, causing ire among critics) and actress Patti LuPone's musical chops.

While The Anarchist is unlikely to merit much mention at this summer's Tonys, Carolee Carmello attracted very positive notices for her role as Aimee Semple McPherson in Scandalous--far more so than any praise for the show--and could be in the hunt for a Best Actress nomination.

Kathie Lee Gifford (Drew Friedman)

“I’ve been in this business 45 years, and I’ve done everything but porn,” Kathie Lee Gifford, the co-host of Today’s fourth hour, recently told The Observer over lunch, poking a fork into her onion soup and twisting the cheese around it purposefully.

“I doubt there’ll be an offer anytime soon,” she added with a laugh, “unless people are really sick.”

The secret to her success, Ms. Gifford added, was discovering where her real talents lay. “I long ago realized half of finding out what you are is what you’re not,” she explained. “I was never going to be Barbra Streisand as a singer. I was never going to be Meryl Streep as an actress. But you learn to accept the fact that there’s only one you.”

However, this self-acceptance hasn’t caused Kathie Lee to stop challenging herself. Hence, her new credit as Broadway impresario.

Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson, which opens November 15, will test the breadth of Ms. Gifford’s appeal as well as her theatrical talents. The musical, for which Ms. Gifford wrote the book and lyrics (the music is by David Friedman, also a productivity guru and life coach, and David Pomeranz), tells the story of Los Angeles-based evangelical preacher McPherson. Quite possibly America’s first true media celebrity, she emerged at the dawn of radio to become one of the most prominent evangelists in the country. While the play is evolving day by day, the current draft uses as its framing device the perjury trial McPherson underwent near the end of her life, after her mysterious 1926 disappearance while swimming at Venice Beach. Presumed drowned, she eventually reappeared in Mexico, claiming to have been kidnapped. Detractors believed she’d been shacked up with a lover.

As Ms. Gifford pointed out, it’s a hell of a story.

“The biggest challenge of writing Aimee is, what do I leave out about her?” she said. “I have a huge piece of marble that was dumped on my front yard and I’ve been chiseling away for 12 years.” The play, previously called Saving Aimee, played in Seattle last year and is the end result of a lifelong obsession for Ms. Gifford, who said she has read 50 books on the subject. “Which story about her do you tell? Do you tell Aimee the evangelist? Do you tell the first superstar? The genius in marketing? The mother, the wife? Do you just do ‘Tabloid Aimee’?”

It’s as hard to know just what to do with Ms. Gifford. There’s the Kathie Lee who co-hosted the syndicated Live! alongside Regis Philbin from 1985 to 2000, and NBC’s Today with sometime Dateline journo Hoda Kotb from 2008 on—a ray of kooky, garrulous and sometimes self-involved light puncturing the earnest Donahue era. There’s the author and lyricist whose previous play, the 2005 children’s musical Under the Bridge, was crucified by the Times—the phrase “gag reflex” was trotted out—and who’s currently working on an adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life. There’s “Tabloid Kathie Lee,” the harridan of TV talk accused of using child labor for her Walmart fashion line in the 1990s. And, perhaps most importantly, there’s the woman of faith, who first heard about Sister Aimee as a student at Oklahoma’s Charismatic Christian college Oral Roberts University and who hikes around Israel in her spare time.

We asked if she considered herself religious. “That’s what people assume,” she said. “I did go to Oral Roberts University, and I made some great friends there. But I left Oral Roberts. There’s a cookie-cutter mentality in many religions. I bristle against any organization that tries to make us alike. That religiosity thing—I rebel against it, I rebelled against it my entire life. And so did she,” Ms. Gifford said of McPherson. While the show is produced in part by the Foursquare Foundation, an arm of McPherson’s Foursquare Church, it is not a spiritual tract. In fact, when quoting scripture, the play sticks to the Old Testament rather than the New, because, Ms. Gifford said, “In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it’s something that we can all relate to. It doesn’t divide—it unites us.”

On Broadway, hundreds of gay chorus boys, as well as the happy blasphemers of The Book of Mormon and Ms. Gifford’s own lead actress, avowed athiest Carolee Carmello, might differ. But no matter. Ms. Gifford has faith, referring us to a favorite verse: Jeremiah 29:11, in which God sent his prophet a message of hope. “I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper. To give you a future and a hope,” she said, paraphrasing.

The show’s inspirations don’t end with the Torah. A key line of dialogue, “If you have a pulse, you have a purpose,” came from Paul Newman, “one of my favorite people ever in the world,” she said. At a fund-raiser for the Westport Playhouse, Ms. Gifford said, Newman greeted her by getting down on one knee and kissing her hand. He told her, “I have a pulse. That’s a good thing.”

She pondered the meaning of this on her way back home to Greenwich—the charitable nature of a Hollywood legend who could have skipped the evening altogether, the belief that there’s always time to make an impact. “I tried to explain to Frank, who was not happy he kissed my hand,” she said. “I told him to be happy that’s all he kissed!”

There she goes again. Ms. Gifford has long been a rebel not just in her theology but in the tightly structured world of TV talk. On Live!, Ms. Gifford and Mr. Philbin would chat at length about themselves for the opening segment, with her contributions largely focused on her children and home life. “Is there anything they won’t say?” asked a 1991 People cover. (A little benign gossip about sportscaster hubby Frank Gifford seems pretty edgy when you’re up against morning infomercials and local news.)

Ms. Gifford sees Live! as somewhat revolutionary—after all, without her kibitzing, would we have ever had Rosie O’Donnell’s pleasantries about the Broadway show she saw last night or the mommy chat on The View? “It was the first time ever on TV—ever—aside from Lucy, that people went through a pregnancy with a woman on television that was real,” she said. “And Regis and I were the first people that I know of where we talked about our lives. We didn’t have a commercial for the first 23 minutes. That had never been done before! And it changed daytime television forever.”

Change can be tough. “With Regis, people who never watched our show accused me of only talking about my children,” Ms. Gifford said. “Somebody accused me of it, and people picked it up, and it became the truth. That’s so untrue. I talked about my kids when it was funny to talk about my kids. I’d talk about a movie if it were funnier, or going to the White House, or stumbling, or throwing up. I talked about life! And when I became a mother, that was a big part of my life.” Besides, she noted, her children eventually banned Mom from bringing them up on-air anyway.

Ms. Gifford’s willingness to put herself out there is what has always made her compelling.

“She’s taught me to let it rip,” said Ms. Kotb. “‘Don’t worry about it. Spontaneity rules.’ She’s loosened my corset so I can breathe, and I’ve tried to check her. We have a banner we run sometimes that says ‘Kathie Lee would like to apologize for what she’s just said, what she’s currently saying, and what she is going to say in the future.’” Certainly there are missteps. Ms. Kotb recalled with chagrin a February 14 broadcast during which her own divorce, on a past Valentine’s Day, had become a hot topic. Thanks, Kathie Lee! “‘That was an in-the-makeup-room discussion, not the we’re-on-TV discussion,’” Ms. Kotb recalls telling her untrammelled colleague. “But for her, it’s just ‘Let it rip!’ There will be potholes and there will be great TV.”

“We want it to be a party, and you’re our guest, and we’re happy to see you,” Ms. Gifford said. “You either get it or you don’t.” A few years back, she became the subject of a savage recurring parody by Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live. The late-night version of Kathie Lee affects a fake Valley Girl accent, tosses back tequila shots, and cuts off Ms. Kotb endlessly.

When we mentioned that Ms. Wiig had left Saturday Night Live in the spring, effectively putting an end to the long-running bit, Ms. Gifford was emphatic. “Thank God,” she said. “I prayed that woman would go someplace. But I thought she was brilliant.” For her part, Ms. Kotb is more of a fan. “Our dialogue is the same!” she said. “They don’t have to change it. The straw sticking out of the box of wine? They get it.”

The pair’s habit of drinking wine on the air has come in for some mockery—it is, after all, 10 a.m., a bit early for a tipple. Ms. Gifford has heard the critiques: “‘Those are the two old broads who drink all the time,’” she said, imitating her detractors. “That’s ludicrous! We take a sip of wine during the show, and the rest of the time we’re having fun. I would be in an asylum, or I would be dead, or my husband would be dead, or those people who think that would be dead, if I didn’t keep it in perspective.”

When we arrived at the steakhouse next to the Neil Simon Theatre to interview Ms. Gifford over lunch, she had an ice pack propped behind her neck and a glass of white parked in front of her. “When you’re up at four, it’s happy hour, know what I mean?” she said. As for the neck pillow, Ms. Carmello had told us that whenever Ms. Gifford’s neck went out, “She’s pushing herself a little too far.”

The murmuring about Ms. Gifford’s love for her “Winesday” Wednesday broadcast is nothing compared with the McPherson-kidnapping-size to-do over her Kathie Lee clothing line. She claims she wrote key lyrics Ms. Carmello delivers as Sister Aimee—“Ever felt that the truth was nowhere to be found?”—during the 1996 Walmart scandal, even before she’d conceived of the musical. Though Ms. Gifford had earmarked some profits from the line for her children’s charities in New York before the story broke, and though she stepped out in front of it, transforming herself into an anti–child labor advocate, some viewers remained skeptical—especially since this was the lady who couldn’t stop gushing over her own little angels, Cody and Cassidy. Or so the narrative went, anyway.

“The truth was not convenient!” she said. “You can go visit where the money went—it’s still there, helping 200 little babies today. I wasn’t angry. I was frustrated.” Over time, she said, she has tried to forgive—“Love and hate cannot live in the same place, spatially,” she intoned sagely—and learned to put the haters out of her mind. “I finally, through all of that, stopped caring what people’s opinions were.”

Ms. Gifford understands that TV has not allowed her to show off the side of herself that can quote scripture or ponder the eternal mysteries of life, and she’s fine with it. “Years ago, I thought the show that Regis and I did was the silliest little show on television. Because we showed up, we sat down on stools, and then for 23 minutes we talked about our lives. Could there be anything more shallow in life? Then you started meeting people—and it happens now with Hoda—‘You got my father through chemotherapy. My mother died smiling in the hospital because you made her laugh. You don’t realize how much you get me through my day.’ I don’t minimize it anymore.”

Even so, the kaffeeklatsch is simply not enough of a creative outlet. “I am a 10 percent silly person,” said Ms. Gifford. “I know how to make a good living being a silly person. But I am not a silly person. And there is not one person who knows me well that would ever characterize me in general as an idiot. Or silly. No, I’m not a silly person. I know how to be silly.”

Lately, after the silly stuff is done, she’s been bolting from the studio and rushing off to the theater for frantic revisions. “Sometimes they make changes, and you’re like, ‘Really? I liked the old way,’” Ms. Carmello told The Observer, after announcing that she had just a few hours to memorize a new monologue. Ms. Gifford had determined that using stagecraft to show Aimee first hearing the voice of God just wouldn’t work. Instead, Ms. Carmello would have to describe it. (“We are breaking the cardinal rule of Theater 101: ‘Show, don’t tell,’” Ms. Gifford admitted later.)

For a woman who must start every day on live television, her focus is impressive. “She sat there in a chair and was so quiet and giving to the performers,” director David Armstrong said of a cabaret performance he attended with Ms. Gifford, “and it was so clear to me she wasn’t just there to be famous. She was there because this is what she was most interested in.” Mr. Armstrong jumped aboard after the Seattle production at his 5th Avenue Theatre, which has a track record as a launchpad for Broadway shows (including Hairspray and Memphis, both Tony-winning Best Musicals); this is his first Broadway production. In addition to the Foursquare Foundation, Scandalous’s producers include Dick and Betsy DeVos, heirs to the fortune of Amway founder Richard DeVos, and Great White Way veteran Jeffrey Finn. (In an interview with the Associated Press, Ms. Gifford claimed that the Foursquare Foundation had no input into the content of the show and that many affiliated with the church were angry that the show existed.)

Like many writers before her, Ms. Gifford has occasionally tried to muscle her way into the directorial process, Ms. Carmello said. “They don’t want her to, because it’s not the chain of command, but if it were up to her, she’d talk to all the actors, ‘Give that word a little punch!’” she said. “She’s been scolded for it. She gets frustrated, sitting out there, because she’s got ideas for how best to play things.”

During a recent preview performance, the front few rows were packed with middle-age ladies and patient husbands, an audience of people who were, judging by their eager chatter, significantly more interested in the show’s writer than its subject matter; Ms. Gifford greeted the fans at intermission, blessing them all for coming.

“You come into their home,” she said later. “They’re naked sometimes, or they’re getting ready, they’re in bed, or they’re in their kitchen—I can’t see what they’re doing. I just know they’re out there. And you become their friend, because they start to trust you. You maintain your credibility. You don’t change. With everything changing, this is something they can count on, that they can hang on to. If I did a porno, I’d lose 45 years of credibility. They’d be stunned. I’d get new fans, let’s be honest! But it’d be so disingenuous.”

If Scandalous is a hit, Kathie Lee Gifford will find a measure of redemption after all of the teasing and snark. And if not, there’s always the Old Testament for inspiration. As she put it: “All of the 4,000 years of Jewish history is about getting the Promised Land, losing the Promised Land, getting promised the Promised Land, going back to the Promised Land and screwing it up again! It’s human nature. And that’s why I love studying it so much.”

Lindsay Lohan. (Getty Images)

– Lindsay Lohan is voting for Mitt Romney, which is probably going to hurt him in the polls even worse than last night's VP debate.

– Speaking of LiLo and her presidential "bumps," she did a first and called TMZ live to tell them that her mom is not on as much cocaine as she originally said.
http://youtu.be/XTehE7hykYs

– In breaking news, Ashton Kutcher is a disgusting human being who spoon-feeds his girlfriend, Mila Kunis, in public at Grom Gelato. Like she's a little baby.

– Everyone is mad at Tory Burch for selling her Hamptons home for ONLY $11 million. What is wrong with her?!?!

– Kathie Lee Gifford dropped a puppy on its adorable head.
http://youtu.be/sQzo_3yIc8M

Perhaps it's a good thing the syndicated talk-show host has put her 1880's Victorian mansion there up for sale (not enough privacy, according to a recent press report). For on the evening of Oct. 31, Ms. O'Donnell did something that had some of her neighbors in a tizzy. Nyack residents told The Transom that parents who took their children trick-or-treating chez O'Donnell were greeted at the entrance gate by a security guard. The adults had to cool their heels while the guard escorted the children the 20 feet to the doorway of Ms. O'Donnell's home where she was waiting to hand out some upscale goodies–Pez dispensers, Spin Pops and full-size Nestle Mocha bars–to the costumed masses.

Even though Ms. O'Donnell is not long for the easygoing, hipster Rockland County suburb, some of the parents were put off by her lack of neighborliness, especially since she has built a reputation on being the nice talk-show host (as long as you're not Tom Selleck).

"Nyack is very open, very friendly," said one resident, who noted that Ms. O'Donnell supplemented the high brick wall that surrounds the property with trees, security cameras and guards. The resident added that "some people were outraged" by the Halloween procedure.

Ms. O'Donnell's publicist, Jennifer Glaisek, said, "I think the fact that [Ms. O'Donnell] actually opens her house up for kids is kind of incredible. I don't really know any other celebrities who do that. And there is a huge influx of people who come there." She estimated at least 1,000 children visited Ms. O'Donnell's home on Halloween.

"There's really no reason for the parents to go up to the house," Ms. Glaisek said. "I mean Halloween is for the kids, it's not for the parents to go see what the house looks like and to be wandering around the property. It's easier that way and it's safer for everyone involved." Ms. Glaisek said that Ms. O'Donnell's security force "are all really nice and respectful and great with children."

Then again, Ms. O'Donnell has always tended to favor kids over her adult public. She has had a longstanding policy of giving autographs only to preadolescents. Said Ms. Glaisek: "It sounds to me like someone was a little sour."

Besides, if Ms. O'Donnell really wanted to piss off the neighbors, all she would have had to do is invite her friend Penny Marshall over and blast Ms. Marshall's nasal Eeyore-like voice over a loudspeaker.

Landmark This!

Those street signs that denote the city's historic districts are done in a color known as terra cotta, but blood red might have been a better choice.

That's the hue that a number of people involved in the process of preserving and commemorating the city's landmarked buildings and neighborhoods are seeing in the wake of a benefit dinner thrown by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel's private, nonprofit Historic Landmarks Preservation Center, or H.L.P.C.

Before and after the event, which was held on Oct. 5 at the Russian Tea Room, some careful readers of the invitation noticed what they claim is a curiously worded sentence about the purpose that H.L.P.C. serves in the city.

The sentence on the back of the invitation read: "The H.L.P.C. has also been responsible for creating the Historic District Street Sign Program, historic markers, plaques and medallions."

But sources familiar with the situation point out that the regulation and designation of historic district street signs are the responsibilities of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, a city agency. Helping to fund that initiative is the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization established in 1980 to financially assist the commission.

So, how does Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel's H.L.P.C., which is not affiliated with either the landmarks commission or its foundation, claim credit for creating the street sign program?

Well, for about 17 years, Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel served as the landmarks commissioner, and for about nine years she was the chair of the foundation, she told The Transom. "I initiated and had approved, designed, created every aspect of all of those programs," she said, including the street sign program.

If that was the case, The Transom asked, then shouldn't the wording on Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel's invitation have been clearer? Shouldn't it at the very least have read that she, not the H.L.P.C., was responsible for creating the street sign program?

"I am the H.L.P.C.," Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel replied. "Now you know."

Still, sources contend that the H.L.P.C.'s invitation, and even the organization's name, could lead some people to confuse Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel's organization with the landmarks commission. For instance, the commission regularly puts up plaques commemorating historic buildings. Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel's organization, on the other hand, installs "cultural medallions" that, according to that aforementioned invitation "document and highlight important aspects of New York City's cultural, economic, political and social history."

One source told The Transom that the foundation sent Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel a letter taking issue with some of the copy found on the Oct. 5 invitation. (Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel said she did not recall receiving any letter.)

The confusion has not been limited to the landmarks commission. In a story about the H.L.P.C. dinner, which was billed as a celebration of the city's "Cultural Laureates," The New York Times reported that a spokesman for the organization had identified the evening's laureates (one of whom happened to be Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel's husband, Carl) as "living landmarks." But Living Landmarks is an appellation that another preservation group, the Landmarks Conservancy, uses for its annual benefit dinner. Not only was the term already in use, but officials at the Landmarks Conservancy–a nonprofit group that offers financial and technical support including grants and low-interest loans to property owners living in historic districts or landmarked buildings–had trademarked the term.

"There has been a lot of confusion among the preservation organizations, particularly if you have landmarks in your title," Landmarks Conservancy president Peg Breen told The Transom. "I think it's important for us to be clear about respective histories and our accomplishments so that people can understand who and what they're giving to." Ms. Breen added: "We each do good things in our way, but each of us is different, Barbaralee's organization being about the newest organization with landmarks in the title. We seem to have made it as confusing as possible and we should do our best to make it as unconfusing as possible."

Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel did not see anything wrong with the invitation's depiction of the H.L.P.C.'s accomplishments. ("My record reflects my history," she said.) She explained that while she was the chairman of the landmarks foundation, she presided over the installation of historic district signage in the lion's share of the districts that exist today, 68 of 71 historic districts by her count. She also contended, "I am the person that is doing the street signs still." Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel, who said her work for the H.L.P.C. is done pro bono, said a number of the historic districts' street signs have been rendered in green, and that she has been lobbying the city's Department of Transportation Commissioner Wilbur Chapman to change them to the correct terra cotta. Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel attempted to arrange a conference call with The Transom to Mr. Chapman's office, but no one answered his phone.

"What have they done?" Ms. Diamonstein-Spielvogel said of the landmarks commission. Then, she added, "I wish them well. There's room for everyone."

Susan Ball, current chairman of the landmarks foundation, acknowledged, "There haven't been many historic districts designated in the last few years. Douglaston, Queens, was the last one." But she added that she's currently working on three new ones: the Hardenbergh Rhinelander, Vinegar Hill and Stone Street historic districts. She also said, "I don't know how many plaques we've put up. We just did one at the Harlem Y.M.C.A. three days ago."

"We're on it tooth and nail," Ms. Ball said, adding that she was unaware of any problem with the color of the historic district street signs. "If she has any problem, she should call the commission or the foundation. That's the normal course of dialogue."

It's Swell, You're Hell

Frank Gifford's punishment is not over.

On Oct. 26, Mr. Gifford got to introduce his wife, talk-show hostess Kathie Lee Gifford, who had flown in from San Francisco to perform at the annual Parkinson's Disease Foundation benefit dinner at the Plaza Hotel. But a few songs into her set, Mrs. Gifford, who seemed to be wearing a bra, trotted out a song that she said she had written herself and which she had performed in the past. Although she forgot a number of the lines (at one point moving her to sing, "I left my mind in San Francisco!"), the song dealt, rather skeptically, with the media's treatment of Mrs. Gifford's tabloid-friendly life, including her husband's infidelity. "They put you on the cover/ Say your marriage is over/ They put you on the cover/ Say your husband's a rover," Mrs. Gifford sang with Ethel Merman-like energy while Mr. Gifford was in the room. "There must be something missing from somebody's life/ If they'd rather read about the plight of Frank Gifford's wife." Around this point in the song, the refrain, which had been a variation on "It's swell, you sell!" became "It's hell, it's hell!"–later, in reference to the media, the line became "It smells, but it sells!" Mrs. Gifford also had a line in there about the press depicting her as someone "who loves to put small kids to work" and adding that if she read all the things the press printed about her, "I'd hate me, too!"

The Transom called Mrs. Gifford's attorney Ron Konecky with the hope of obtaining the complete lyrics, but Mr. Konecky said he was unable to reach Mrs. Gifford by press time. He did say, however, that the song dealt with "much more" than her marriage. Mr. Konecky said the song lampoons the press and that it was her husband who advised her to write it.

In this respect, at least, Fame certainly fulfills-and at times, even over-fulfills-its principal purposes, which have nothing to do with the experience of art. Yet, because MoMA still purports to be an art museum, this shift from a serious interest in works of art to a focus on "cultural artifacts" inevitably entails some fairly bizarre practices. For example, it obliges the museum to confer the status of artist on the Los Angeles Police Department-a government agency not heretofore famous for its esthetic prowess-simply because its technicians processed a photograph of a well-known suspect in a ghastly double homicide: O.J. Simpson, of course.

But this misconceived elevation of the L.A. Police Department to the status of artist is no more bizarre, really, than the experience of encountering in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art a collection of trashy pictures proudly described as "a selection from Donald Trump's personal collection of photographs [that] shows the tycoon with famous people, including the actor Sylvester Stallone, the television hostess Kathie Lee Gifford, and the saxophonist Kenny G." But this is what happens when art museums abandon the functions for which they were created in order to engage in popular outreach programs that claim to illuminate some significant social development but in fact are designed to appeal to the kind of popular taste that is guaranteed to maximize box-office sales.

About the specific social development that is traced in the Fame exhibition-"the changing relationship between photography and fame over the years since the medium's invention in 1839," as the museum itself defines the subject-this show adds nothing important to what is already known to virtually every person on the face of the earth who has had the benefit of receiving even a minimal education about the modern world. Does the public that is now crowding the Fame exhibition really need to be told that tabloid newspapers, slick magazines, Hollywood movies, television and now the Internet have changed the ways in which celebrity is technologically fabricated to serve specific commercial and political purposes?

Not really. To a greater or lesser extent, the public for which this exhibition is designed is already in possession of that information. This is not a subject that has to be studied in the classroom or pondered in a museum exhibition. Anyone who now owns a television set, looks at newspapers, goes to the movies and has passed an hour or two at a sizable flea market will have noticed that the packaging of fame and celebrity has changed over the years-and changed, for the most part, in ways that add to a further debasement of a popular culture that is already conceived to infantilize its consumers.

What the Fame exhibition offers to a public already infantilized by our media culture is yet another opportunity to bask in the degradation of its own worst taste. For this is an exhibition that flatters and apotheosizes the very subject-the corrupting dynamics of contemporary celebrity-that it pretends to illuminate. As for the museum's motives in mounting such an exhibition, one can only speculate, of course. H.L. Mencken may have said it best when he observed that no one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American public. That this cynical observation may now apply to the Museum of Modern Art is not itself a happy development.

It is one that we are likely to see further advanced in the immediate future, however. As more and more of our art museums discover that there are lucrative box-office sales to be had from exhibitions that give priority to "cultural artifacts" over works of high artistic accomplishment, the very nature of the art museum as an institution is bound to undergo a radical change.

This season we have already been given a vivid example of this shift in priorities in the American Century exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and last year we were given an even worse example in the show devoted to motorcycles at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which, not incidentally, will next year bring us an exhibition devoted to the work of Norman Rockwell.

The Fame exhibition is not only a depressing development in itself, but an even more depressing augury of what awaits us-all in the name of art, of course-in the century to come. It remains on view at MoMA through Oct. 5.