of public discourse.38 With the spread of print, and the rising literacy rates that followed, Habermas saw the emergence of the “bourgeois public sphere,” a realm apart from the state that thrived in coffeehouses, taverns, and salons, where individuals—at this time primarily propertied, educated men—could debate issues of public concern and challenge state authority. Thus certain individuals were transformed from a position of passive deference to the social order into active participants in public culture. As Habermas argues, the idea of the democratic society rests on the model of the political public sphere. The public sphere in turn is dependent on the fourth estate, the press that acts as a watchdog, fostering an informed and empowered public. It is the informed public that is thereby able to hold those in power accountable.
Of course there was never just one public sphere, but various counterpublics that especially grew in size and influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rise of these public spheres, especially in cities, and sustained by the explosive growth of newspapers in the 1700s and 1800s, had a powerful effect on how traditional elites were regarded. And it was especially in the nineteenth century in the United States that we see how this historic shift, and the rise of an increasingly commercialized and consumer culture, that enabled nonelites to gain visibility, furthered the shift from fame to celebrity. Increasingly public figures “owed more to their visibility and ability to attract publicity than to their achievements or pedigree.”39
From tombs and coins to statues and portraits, all of these monuments and objects preserved one’s image, and in some cases their fame, long after they had died. One classic example of how fame can span millennia is the notoriety of King Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt, born around 1341 BC. King Tut, as he came to be known, became pharaoh at the age of eight after the disastrous rule of his predecessor Akhenaten. Akhenaten had violated various rituals and practices sacred to the Egyptians, and Tut, relying on excellent advisors, restored the previous practices and became a symbol of this restoration to “the proper order of things.”40 Beyond this, his reign was not particularly notable.41 When he died at the age of eighteen, he was buried in the Valley of the Kings, his tomb filled with murals depicting his journey to the afterworld and various artifacts, including precious jewelry, statues, and toys from his childhood.
In the nineteenth century, wealthy Europeans began to explore and excavate various ancient sites, hoping to find artifacts for their homes or to place in museums. One aristocrat, Lord Carnarvon, fascinated by Egyptology, funded the work of the archeologist Howard Carter who was looking for tombs of the royals and upper classes. Just as Carnarvon—who had been funding Carter since 1907—was about to pull the plug, Carter and his workmen, in November 1922, discovered an opening to a descending stairway leading to an underground tomb. They eventually got to a door with Tutankhamun’s name on it and broke through it. There they were stunned to find a nearly perfectly intact tomb, which included almost 5,400 objects the pharaoh might need in the next life, from perfumes and oils to sandals and linen underwear to his solid gold coffin.42
The discovery of an untouched 3,000-year-old-tomb was an international sensation that sparked further fascination with ancient Egypt; it took Carter ten years to catalog all the treasures, which eventually went to the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. It also inspired what came to be called a wave of “Tut-mania,” with newspapers vying for stories and scoops about Tut, the tomb, and, especially, the alleged “Pharaoh’s Curse,” meaning death for anyone who invaded or disturbed a pharaoh’s tomb.43 Egyptian motifs became popular on clothes, jewelry, and in Art Deco architecture; a fruit company featured King Tut brand lemons; President Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut. Carter and Carnarvon (along with Tut) became instant celebrities; the American magician Charles Carter rebranded himself as Carter the Great. A 1923 record, “Old King Tut,” became a hit.44
Fifty years later, in 1976, the blockbuster museum exhibit The Treasures of Tutankhamun became an American obsession, touring the country for three years; it was the most popular museum show in U.S. history.45 As the Associated Press reported, “People waited in lines for nine hours to see it during its first stop two years ago in Washington. In Chicago, crowds gathered at 10 the night before the show opened.” The Los Angeles Times called the phenomenon a “King Tut binge” and said museum attendees were like “a human tidal wave.”46 The New York Times estimated that at least 400 manufacturers were producing Tut-inspired products, including whiskey bottles in the shape of Tut’s death mask.47 By April 1978, the comedian Steve Martin appeared on Saturday Night Live in a pharaoh’s costume singing his instantly hilarious and famous song “King Tut,” which contained the lyrics “Now when he was a young man / He never thought he’d see / People stand in line to see the boy king” and “Now, if I’d known / They’d line up just to see you / I’d trade in all my money / And bought me a museum.” He ended with “He gave his life for tourism.”
Why this fascination with a pharaoh from over 3,000 years ago? Why did he become an unwitting celebrity? Because so many tombs of the pharaohs had been looted, to find one so complete and untouched was unique and thrilling. And, in part, it was all of the surviving possessions, the gold, the jewels, the statues, as opposed to any singular accomplishments in his life, which made him a twentieth-century star. But the tomb was also a window into what was believed to be the first great civilization, and it was the use of mummification and the myth of the pharaoh’s curse that tied Tut and ancient Egypt to the supernatural, the occult. His tomb, with all of the clothing, food, and the like that were to accompany him into a fervently believed in afterlife, tap into our fascination with and fears about death and fantasies of immortality. All this physical evidence of a faith in an afterlife, and then everyday people seeing someone who died 3,000 years before but is now newly known, did mean Tut now mattered to posterity, was not fully gone at all. As humans grapple with the meaning of life, with the “why are we here” question, seeing evidence of those who came before us, what they made, how they lived and what they believed connects us to a sense of origins. Tut and ancient Egypt were, to twentieth-century Brits and Americans, exotic, different. Yet he was an emblem of the persistence of human striving, and of the faith in eternal life.
Do our lives matter? Does what we do matter after we’re gone? By the twentieth century, the rise of secularization and a waning belief, for some, in an afterlife, “bred a twin obsession with posterity and death.”48 Celebrity—to be known by millions, to be mourned when you go, to live on in the hearts and minds of people—tied the new mechanisms and technologies of fame production with that age-old longing for everlasting life.
Celebrity and Aura
If remote, unknowable, but famous royalty had an aura about them that stemmed in fact from their being so rare, so distinctive, so elevated from everyday people, what has omnipresent, intensified visibility done to the aura of the famous? In the mid-1930s, the social critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay entitled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he argued that technological innovation, especially with the rise of “mass culture,” led to a shift in the nature and value of art, and his argument applies to how mass-produced visuality may have affected the shift from fame to celebrity. Early art, he argued, was one of a kind, embedded in specific locations and rituals, and because a painting or sculpting was not identically reproducible, it had an aura. Think, for example, of the aura surrounding the Mona Lisa. Part of the aura, embedded in it, was knowledge of the artwork’s particular historical uses and its ownership over time. This aura imbues the work with authenticity; the one-of-a-kind painting, for example, was distinguished by its uniqueness and its remoteness from daily life. Benjamin contended that the aura of the art object has been destroyed by widespread reproduction—we can all get prints of the Mona Lisa if we want—in that the process of duplicating an artwork effaces the uniqueness of the object and its distance from the viewer.
In a museum, for instance, works are presented as individual, distinctive, and therefore special; they are secured within the halls of the institution, sometimes even behind glass, and we can’t own or even touch them. Elevated as singular works of inaccessible beauty that we are meant to admire, even worship, they retain their aura. Benjamin argues that
