LQ 04-1: Celebrity (2011) There are times when our worship of celebrities seems like a
True, there are now probably more people famous for being famous than ever before, but such people have always existed, and humans have always paid them more attention than they merited. True, much celebrity is founded on genuine achievement, but even more genuine achievement has gone uncelebrated. Our century may be unusual only in the intensity of celebrity worship. But every historical era is an outlier in some aspect of human possibility; that’s how and why we mark them. Cultural expression varies over time and place, but the range of cultural options is remarkably small. One of them is celebrity, labelled fame in earlier times.
The desire for fame was often considered a virtuous ambition, especially by the Greeks and Romans, for it prompted striving for excellence. The desire for notoriety has been seen as the corresponding vice. While the great religions have praised the one and condemned the other, they have also expressed some ambivalence. For glorying in fame, even that earned by virtue or excellence, is too close to pride, especially its pathetic variant, vanity.
Celebrity belongs to the suite of social dimensions labelled “reputation.” Our public persona is our reputation. We know ourselves in the tension and contrast between that public persona and our self-perception. That makes reputation important: We want outer and inner self to be as closely aligned as possible. It may be that our focus on celebrity is in part an attempt to learn how to create a reputation that meets our expectations or fantasies about ourselves.
There’s a lot to chew on in this collection. One is P T Barnum’s discussion of how to make celebrity pay: Manufacture it. Reading his comments, one sees that marketing is the commodification of celebrity, which in turn explains phenomena such as the Kardashians. That’s progress of a sort, perhaps.
Recommended. ****
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