Editorial: Fame is fleeting, and so too legacy

Opinion

In life, said Andy Warhol, we get our 15 minutes of fame. In death, it now seems, we are remembered for only another six months.

At the heart of one of the world's great old cities, beneath the towering Nelson's Column, Battle of Britain hero Sir Keith Park - a New Zealander - was this week commemorated with the unveiling of his statue.

That sculpture, made out of glass-fibre, stands on the "Fourth Plinth" in London's Trafalgar Square. On the other corners of the square stand King George IV, and two 19th-century Imperial generals.

So to have a Kiwi upstart join them - while not quite knocking the old moustached, pith-helmeted leaders off their pedestals - is charming colonial cheek.

But (and here's the catch) it will remain there for only six months.

After that, as Park's rather impolitic great-great nephew Terence Stevens-Prior noted: "The theory is that Queen Elizabeth will end up there - I think that's fair enough."

Perhaps so. It is just down the road from Her Majesty's Buckingham Palace office, after all.

A permanent bronze statue of Sir Keith is to be erected next year in a nearby thoroughfare that no one ever visits.

He might have been quietly surprised to learn that his bravery would be so quickly sidelined, like the fleeting celebrity of a reality TV contestant. Even Warhol never foresaw pop culture treating war heroes like a can of Campbell's tomato soup.