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are, and no other. Taylor has written a book, Hiding, which advances the argument that the very idea of “depth,” and thus of “deep meaning,” is an illusion—that you can keep peeling away surfaces, and in the end you get . . . another surface. “This does not mean that everything is simply superficial,” he writes; “to the contrary, in the absence of depth, everything becomes endlessly complex.” Taylor loves the new Times Square of myriad reflective surfaces, of electronic apparitions fostered by global entertainment companies; it was his idea that we meet at Madame Tussaud’s, the perfect place for a lesson in virtuality.

Madame Tussaud’s is, of course, one of the chief “entertainment concepts” of Times Square, an international chain of “museums” which traffic in representations that confound the distinction between the real and the not-real. This particular Madame Tussaud’s features a Broadwayinflected grouping of statues called “Opening Night,” a party held in a kind of Roman courtyard featuring flawless effigies of Elton John, Elle MacPherson, Sarah Ferguson, Donald and Ivana Trump (separately, of course), Nicolas Cage, George Steinbrenner, network news anchors, and, rising majestically from the fountain in the center of the room, the famous cross-dresser RuPaul, naked under his sequins, à la Josephine Baker (whom we also see later). Elsewhere are world leaders, athletes, figures from the French Revolution; here, in the place of honor, are the heroes of the media culture. The room is itself a tribute to the endlessly repeated imagery that makes for modern celebrity.

As Taylor and I were standing at the edge of “Opening Night,” I noticed an old woman with a handbag posed behind the newscaster Matt Lauer. Who in the world was she supposed to be? And then she moved: it was an old woman with a handbag. Taylor was delighted by this play of appearances. “Who’s that?” he said to the friends of another woman standing next to Elle; and they all dissolved in a hail of giggles. “There are wax museums out west where they have Greek sculptures that have been colored,” he said. But of course, many Greek sculptures were originally colored. The fake was truer than what we experience as the real. He had read, he said, that the criteria by which a forgery was detected were the same as those used to judge the original. “In other words, what constitutes the ‘authenticity’ of the authentic?”

Taylor showed almost no interest in the actual simulacra before us; what fascinated him was the idea of the simulacrum, and of Times Square as the center of a proliferating world of globalized images and messages and data. “Times Square,” he said, “is now about globalization. Look at everything Virgin is into, and it just explodes.” It was an airline that had ramified into a music store. “What they’re trying to do is create the Virgin way of life. And who knows what Viacom owns, and how all these things connect? And then there’s this whole question of inside and outside. You have these studios, ABC, MTV, or ESPN, which have shows where they will literally make the audience perform at certain moments—live TV.” Taylor was, of course, thinking of TRL. He talked about Las Vegas, another node in the network of global imagery; the difference between the Vegas of Robert Venturi et al. and the Vegas of today, he said, was “the difference between automobile culture and driving down the road, on the one hand, and electronic culture and being inside a virtual reality terminal.” The Times Square equivalent was the forest of electronic signs and studios, gesturing over our heads to one another. “There’s a sense in which in Times Square you’re inside an imagistic, virtual space,” Taylor went on. “It’s the image that is being continually replayed that is creating the space.”

Taylor understood Times Square as the all-but-perfected form of a new world, a world whose essential commodity was information, and which was thus based on the insubstantial, the transitory, the instantly transmissible—information as a universal currency into which all the solid things of the world