from top to bottom, with those at the bottom rarely seeing those at the top. Fame was reserved for those rare people who were known because of their hereditary positions or extraordinary achievements; there was an aura around them; they were remote and inaccessible. As the historian Neal Gabler has noted, “Indeed, fame was less likely to be sought than imposed as a consequence of accomplishment or office. In effect, it was a mantle one wore, not something one chased.”8 So fame rested on distance, deference to greatness (whether achieved or inherited), and often adoration. Compared to today there were very few outlets for widespread visibility. The proliferation of media and communications technologies beginning in the nineteenth century, especially those involving the mechanical reproduction of images like photography and film, changed all that and enabled the democratization of fame. The big change, as Gabler noted, is that now the whole point of being famous is visibility: “being seen on the right pages and at the right places with the right people. To hold yourself aloof seems pathological.”
Today, some twenty-first-century celebrities, it is said, are famous simply for being famous. Scholars such as Leo Lowenthal argued that there exist different types of celebrities—some who are known for their hard work, talents, and achievements, and others who are infamous for their sensational lifestyles, scandals, and pure entertainment value.9 Chris Rojek divided celebrity status into three categories: ascribed, meaning you were born into fame, like a member of a royal family or child of a celebrity; achieved, meaning you earned it through admired accomplishments; and attributed, which is a media-generated fame, such as a reality TV star or someone involved in a scandal.10 Thus, while we may tend to think of celebrities as models of excellence—the smartest, fastest, and most beautiful, the most talented—they may also be models of scorn—the notorious, the wasteful, the failed. Still others consider them as mere irritants, purposeless chimeras.
Celebrity culture is not only about the hallowed few who find the spotlight—it is also, perhaps especially, about the fans who consume it and the pleasures we find in that consumption. We relish the escape, the fantasies of wealth, beauty, and deference, and the ability to feel superior to people who may have (or once had) “it all,” but now have gained weight, married poorly, or truly embarrassed themselves in public. And the “behind-the-scenes” blogs and Twitter wars, with the supposed real dirt that exposes publicists’ spin or gives a sense of being in the know, convey a sense of being able to rip open the curtains hiding the great and powerful Oz.
Celebrities are the conduits for our dreams—if they can do it, I can do it; I want to do what they get to do. Whatever the category of celebrity, these individuals offer up visions of potential; they serve as avatars who perform our dreams, and sometimes our nightmares. They warn us of what could be if we choose the wrong path. By publicly performing their own scandals and controversies, they serve as glitzy stand-ins for everyday issues of deep concern to people, from infidelity and divorce, to financial ruin, to illness and aging, and to broader social issues, like sexism, racism, and homophobia. Celebrity culture polices the boundaries of everyday behavior: what celebrities are praised for, we should emulate; what they are reviled for, we should spurn. They may give us hope for the future, warn us of what could be if we choose the wrong path, and even make us feel thankful for the ordinariness of our own lives. “Stars matter,” as Richard Dyer writes, “because they act out aspects of life that matter to us.”11
For these reasons, various scholars have argued that celebrities—and the industries that produce and maintain them—reinforce, or at times challenge, certain dominant cultural ideologies. Of course they embody standards of beauty, handsomeness, and an idealized body. They also help to create and sustain our dreams of upward mobility, especially in an era of increased inequality between the rich and everyone else. In this way, they can also even work to justify economic and social hierarchies. Some, like James Dean in the 1950s or Tom Cruise in the 1980s, functioned as models of male youthful rebellion or bravado, while Madonna in the 1980s and 1990s and Beyoncé in the 2010s were models of female strength, agency, and defiance of traditional constraints placed on women. In this way, celebrities and the narratives that circulate around them serve as “vessels,” which perform and, in doing so, reveal the hopes and anxieties of the cultural moment in which they exist.12
But celebrities do not only reflect—or even come to alter—our cultural values; they also speak to our ideas about ourselves. The nature of celebrity, which claims to offer us public visions of private persons, may have a deep impact on the way in which we think and feel about our bodies, our relationships, and our very identities. Indeed, contemporary celebrity journalism obsessively tracks the personal, “private” lives of famous figures, chronicling (and critiquing) the minutiae of their lives, while inviting audiences to do the same. Twenty-first-century celebrity, therefore, combined with the explosion of social media, have been criticized for allegedly helping to foster a generation of narcissists, obsessed with publicly performing their lives (usually online) and willing to adopt for themselves the relentless judgment that accompanies such performances.13
With these critiques in mind, it may be easy to dismiss celebrities as consumerist booby traps, meant to suck us into purchasing the latest designer bag, fad diet, or ridiculously expensive pair of jeans. Or as mere distractions, simply deflecting attention away from current events and the depressing stream of stories that dominate the evening news. Or as trivialities, social climbers grasping for Andy Warhol’s infamous fifteen minutes of fame, perhaps snagging only six or seven in today’s frantic media economy. You would not, of course, be wrong. Yet these are some of the very reasons that celebrities deserve our attention. The story of celebrity is the story of our cultural experience, particularly in our contemporary society where they dominate our popular culture. The mechanisms by which individuals become famous, the ideological visions that celebrities represent and communicate, the reasons why “ordinary” people are attracted to stars, and the influence that this cycle of production and consumption has on our culture is profound, growing, and worthy of our attention.
That celebrity is often trivialized and marginalized in journalistic, academic, and political discourse, despite being intensely popular and generating billions of dollars, makes the study of fame all the more important. We should not be pooh-poohed into thinking that celebrity culture is merely entertainment. Because that dismissal urges us to ignore an industry that promotes certain kinds of values and attitudes, about gender, sexuality, success, class, race, relationships, and happiness, while utterly minimizing others. These values also affirm which kinds of people deserve admiration, comfort, and success and which kinds do not. In the pages that follow, we will critically examine the evolution of celebrity in an effort to develop our understanding of the relationship between famous figures, media technologies, and audiences. By attending to the history and evolution of these relationships, we can better understand the ways in which media systems and the famous figures they produce reflect our pleasures, values, and aspirations back to us in their glittering images. We can also appreciate that many aspects of celebrity culture actually have a long history, and that once electronic media technologies developed in the nineteenth century and beyond, significant precedents were set about celebrity production and consumption that are still with us today.
Fame is not an immutable phenomenon, but rather one that has emerged, proliferated, persisted, and changed thanks to evolving technological, cultural, and ideological mechanisms. Contemporary media modalities, including the Internet and social media, mobile technologies, and an ever-growing array of digital platforms, have created a boon in the celebrity industry, spawning a vast cohort of stars and an equally impressive bevy of news programs, blogs, and magazines that endlessly clamor for new personas to attract our attention, and our dollars. With social media in particular, the barriers to becoming well known have been crumbling. So celebrity should not be seen as a static, fixed state, but an ongoing process requiring the constant renewal of media visibility; otherwise, your celebrity capital declines. After all, celebrity is a disposable commodity (the “has-been”)—in the media today, gone tomorrow. Thus, there is constant competition to stay in the media spotlight and garner that increasingly scarce and overburdened resource, audience attention. Today, with so many competing 24/7 platforms for individual promotion, with celebrity status more attainable for many yet also more fleeting,
