From a Globe and Mail profile of someone named Tila Tequila, a MySpace pheenom who has had a reality show debut recently on MTV:

The mainstream press have heralded Ms. Tequila's arrival with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. “When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?” worried a New York Times critic last week.

There's some other good stuff in the Oct. 28 NYT piece by Guy Trebay:

It’s routine to dismiss these people, to sniff from the sideline about the depths to which the culture has sunk. Misses Hilton and Tequila may represent, respectively, leisure-class and working-class variants of the same feminine caricature, a real-time Betty Boop. And yet each, in her own way, has divined truths about the marketplace that academics and industry are still laboring fully to comprehend. Each has understood the wacko populism of the cybersphere and pitched her ambitions to capitalize on what Joshua Gamson, the author of “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America” calls “a shift from top-down manufactured celebrity to a kind of lateral, hyper-democratic celebrity.”

“Because of new technologies, we get to see now what happens when people have the option of making up their own celebrity,” Mr. Gamson said. “We’ve gone from ‘Oh, my God, they’re so much better than I am,’ to ‘Oh, my God, they’re so good at making themselves up.’”