Let’s compare two people. The first is Sir Paul Nurse. He is a geneticist who researched the process of cell-division associated with cancer. He has won a Nobel Prize, is President of the Royal Society and Head of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation. Sir Paul is very famous among medical researchers, but is not known to the wider public. He does not appear in gossip columns, has not been on Strictly Come Dancing or similar shows, and does not promote commercial products on television. He is therefore not a celebrity.
The second person is Kate Hopkins. She became famous as a singularly unpleasant contestant on a television programme The Apprentice, but has subsequently taken her unpleasantness to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Big Brother. Her second marriage was filmed on a television programme, and she has made various guest appearances on television. She writes newspaper columns (in The Sun and now The Mail), which have become famous for their vicious remarks. On drowned migrants, she said: “No, I don't care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in the water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care“. Kate Hopkins is a celebrity.
The word ‘celebrity’ is used loosely to designate anyone who is famous. But ths is misleading. There are many famous sportsmen, singers, actors and politicians who seek publicity to promote their careers but also strive to maintain a private life. Yet because they are famous, they become the focus of public curiosity and adulation, and hence the targets of the stalkers in the mass media, with their long-distance cameras, raids on refuse bins, and offers of cash to former confidantes and lovers. A more appropriate definition of a ‘celebrity’ is therefore someone who, like Kate Hopkins, makes money by achieving fame from a relentless quest for publicity.
How then do you become such a celebrity? The first step is to come to public notice, through either some positive or negative achievement. From there, it is essential to market in the mass media your personality and intimate revelations about your personal life. This provides an impression of intimacy for the voyeur-public, but, more importantly, can generate income from guest appearances, articles in the press and so on. A measure of your successful attainment of celebrity status is when you become a subject for gossip, revelations, and moralising. This achievement, however, can not be taken for granted, and you will need to constantly generate news through repeated changes of appearance, personal revelations, well-publicised outbreaks of shocking behaviour, or the expression of bizarre opinions. These do not need to be true or authentic: the press are eager for copy and the public believe what they want to believe. Many celebrities seem to be pleasant and charming people, but it is bad behaviour that most attracts attention. Revelations about shocking behaviour range from giving silly names to the celebrity’s children, relationships or disputes with other celebrities, sexual incontinence, and extreme personal extravagance. Weddings are a particularly occasion for the latter because film and photo rights can be sold, and product brands can be advertised. The production of revelations has now become industrialised with the development of social media. It is claimed that a celebrity should aim at a minimum output of six twitter feeds a day, although this work can of course be devolved to agents. Similarly, celebrities will usually employ a ghost writer to pen their ‘autobiography’. These can become almost an annual production - Katie Price produced four in six years. Ghost writers can also be used to generate novels, published in the name of the celebrity.
Changes of appearance can be either in clothes (particularly at red-carpet events), hairstyle or plastic surgery. In the ultra-competitive celebrity marketplace, there is trend towards ever-more extreme modifications. Lady Gaga attracted publicity by wearing a dress made of meat, which clearly exceeded Madonna’s earlier attire of cone-shaped bras. The former ‘glamour model’ Katie Price became famous for plastic surgery to increase her breast size to a grotesque 32FF. She has subsequently had various other operations on her breasts, as well as liposuction on her hips and thighs, fat implanted into her lips to boost her pout, and a nose job. Most female celebrities will at some point appear naked, either in photo-shoots, music videos, vlogs, or sex videos (which they will usually denounce as pirated).
The ultimate achievement of a celebrity career is to become a super-celebrity. The person then becomes a 2D icon, converted from a human being into a brand, which can be exploited to develop new and diverse product-lines such as perfumes or clothes. The super-celebrity career is extremely profitable. Maria Sharapova has endorsed Motorola, Land Rover, Canon, Tag Heuer, Tiffany (her own range of earrings), Nike (her own collection), Gatorade, Tropicana, Cole Haan (her range of shoes and handbags), Prince and then Head racquets, and Porsche (‘brand ambassador’). She also brands a line of sweets called ‘Sugarpova’, and at one time considered changing her name to help promote it. In 2014, she earned $22 million from endorsements, compared with a measly $2.4 million from winning tennis matches.
It is wrong to see super-celebrities as some kind of capitalist conspiracy to delude the public: celebrities thrive because they meet an urgent popular demand. Super-celebrities provide for many people an idealised version of the self, in image, possessions and behaviour. The stream of news about the celebrity’s supposed ‘private life’ provides a pseudo-intimacy, such that millions of people around the world eagerly follow the most banal information about their deeds. Needless to say, this appearance of intimacy is spurious because celebrities carefully control access, often for their personal protection. A large entourage surrounds each super-celebrity.
The culture of celebrity has significantly changed how people see the world and how they believe they should behave in it. One of the distinctive features of celebrity is the combination of an elevated status and wealth with revelations of a supposedly mundane daily life. This creates an illusion that celebrities are like the rest of us, and therefore that all could become rich and famous instantly, without any special talent or endeavour. Since this is untrue, it also creates a sense of frustration and anger, which can be exploited by a new breed of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump. These pose as defenders of the common man and woman against unspecified ‘elites’, display their vast wealth and behave badly. In so doing, they act as an intermediary for people to project their own resentments and inadequacies on to others. The power this gives can bewilder even the celebrity politician. Donald Trump said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters”.
Celebrities can of course be brought low. The public can switch their adulation to another person, although why and how this happens is not clear. It may just be that the public gets bored and a more entertaining competitor comes along. The only sure way of maintaining celebrity status in the long term is to die tragically young. The deaths of super-celebrities then become vast public events, in which the immortality and great virtue of the celebrity is asserted. An example is the death of Princess Diana in 1997, in which a million people lined the streets of London in a massive display of collective grief. In the four weeks after her death, the suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17%. In other words, the pull of celebrity was so great that significant numbers of people wished to join her in death.
See also: New gods for old http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/new-gods-for-old.html
The rise of the celebrity wedding http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/rise-of-celebrity-wedding.html
The second person is Kate Hopkins. She became famous as a singularly unpleasant contestant on a television programme The Apprentice, but has subsequently taken her unpleasantness to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Big Brother. Her second marriage was filmed on a television programme, and she has made various guest appearances on television. She writes newspaper columns (in The Sun and now The Mail), which have become famous for their vicious remarks. On drowned migrants, she said: “No, I don't care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in the water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care“. Kate Hopkins is a celebrity.
The word ‘celebrity’ is used loosely to designate anyone who is famous. But ths is misleading. There are many famous sportsmen, singers, actors and politicians who seek publicity to promote their careers but also strive to maintain a private life. Yet because they are famous, they become the focus of public curiosity and adulation, and hence the targets of the stalkers in the mass media, with their long-distance cameras, raids on refuse bins, and offers of cash to former confidantes and lovers. A more appropriate definition of a ‘celebrity’ is therefore someone who, like Kate Hopkins, makes money by achieving fame from a relentless quest for publicity.
How then do you become such a celebrity? The first step is to come to public notice, through either some positive or negative achievement. From there, it is essential to market in the mass media your personality and intimate revelations about your personal life. This provides an impression of intimacy for the voyeur-public, but, more importantly, can generate income from guest appearances, articles in the press and so on. A measure of your successful attainment of celebrity status is when you become a subject for gossip, revelations, and moralising. This achievement, however, can not be taken for granted, and you will need to constantly generate news through repeated changes of appearance, personal revelations, well-publicised outbreaks of shocking behaviour, or the expression of bizarre opinions. These do not need to be true or authentic: the press are eager for copy and the public believe what they want to believe. Many celebrities seem to be pleasant and charming people, but it is bad behaviour that most attracts attention. Revelations about shocking behaviour range from giving silly names to the celebrity’s children, relationships or disputes with other celebrities, sexual incontinence, and extreme personal extravagance. Weddings are a particularly occasion for the latter because film and photo rights can be sold, and product brands can be advertised. The production of revelations has now become industrialised with the development of social media. It is claimed that a celebrity should aim at a minimum output of six twitter feeds a day, although this work can of course be devolved to agents. Similarly, celebrities will usually employ a ghost writer to pen their ‘autobiography’. These can become almost an annual production - Katie Price produced four in six years. Ghost writers can also be used to generate novels, published in the name of the celebrity.
Changes of appearance can be either in clothes (particularly at red-carpet events), hairstyle or plastic surgery. In the ultra-competitive celebrity marketplace, there is trend towards ever-more extreme modifications. Lady Gaga attracted publicity by wearing a dress made of meat, which clearly exceeded Madonna’s earlier attire of cone-shaped bras. The former ‘glamour model’ Katie Price became famous for plastic surgery to increase her breast size to a grotesque 32FF. She has subsequently had various other operations on her breasts, as well as liposuction on her hips and thighs, fat implanted into her lips to boost her pout, and a nose job. Most female celebrities will at some point appear naked, either in photo-shoots, music videos, vlogs, or sex videos (which they will usually denounce as pirated).
The ultimate achievement of a celebrity career is to become a super-celebrity. The person then becomes a 2D icon, converted from a human being into a brand, which can be exploited to develop new and diverse product-lines such as perfumes or clothes. The super-celebrity career is extremely profitable. Maria Sharapova has endorsed Motorola, Land Rover, Canon, Tag Heuer, Tiffany (her own range of earrings), Nike (her own collection), Gatorade, Tropicana, Cole Haan (her range of shoes and handbags), Prince and then Head racquets, and Porsche (‘brand ambassador’). She also brands a line of sweets called ‘Sugarpova’, and at one time considered changing her name to help promote it. In 2014, she earned $22 million from endorsements, compared with a measly $2.4 million from winning tennis matches.
It is wrong to see super-celebrities as some kind of capitalist conspiracy to delude the public: celebrities thrive because they meet an urgent popular demand. Super-celebrities provide for many people an idealised version of the self, in image, possessions and behaviour. The stream of news about the celebrity’s supposed ‘private life’ provides a pseudo-intimacy, such that millions of people around the world eagerly follow the most banal information about their deeds. Needless to say, this appearance of intimacy is spurious because celebrities carefully control access, often for their personal protection. A large entourage surrounds each super-celebrity.
The culture of celebrity has significantly changed how people see the world and how they believe they should behave in it. One of the distinctive features of celebrity is the combination of an elevated status and wealth with revelations of a supposedly mundane daily life. This creates an illusion that celebrities are like the rest of us, and therefore that all could become rich and famous instantly, without any special talent or endeavour. Since this is untrue, it also creates a sense of frustration and anger, which can be exploited by a new breed of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump. These pose as defenders of the common man and woman against unspecified ‘elites’, display their vast wealth and behave badly. In so doing, they act as an intermediary for people to project their own resentments and inadequacies on to others. The power this gives can bewilder even the celebrity politician. Donald Trump said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters”.
Celebrities can of course be brought low. The public can switch their adulation to another person, although why and how this happens is not clear. It may just be that the public gets bored and a more entertaining competitor comes along. The only sure way of maintaining celebrity status in the long term is to die tragically young. The deaths of super-celebrities then become vast public events, in which the immortality and great virtue of the celebrity is asserted. An example is the death of Princess Diana in 1997, in which a million people lined the streets of London in a massive display of collective grief. In the four weeks after her death, the suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17%. In other words, the pull of celebrity was so great that significant numbers of people wished to join her in death.
See also: New gods for old http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/new-gods-for-old.html
The rise of the celebrity wedding http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/rise-of-celebrity-wedding.html
