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`Graeme Turner is one of the leading figures in cultural studies today. When his gaze turns to celebrity, the result is a readable and compelling account of this most perplexing and infuriating of modern phenomena. Read on!' - Toby Miller, New York University We cannot escape celebrity culture: it is everywhere. So just what is the cultural function of celebrity? This is the first comprehensive overview of the production and consumption of celebrity from within cultural and media studies. The pervasive influence of contemporary celebrity, and the cultures it produces, has been widely noticed. Earlier studies, though, have tended to focus on the consumption of celebrity or on particular locations of celebrity - Hollywood, or the sports industries for instance. This book presents a broad survey across all media as well as a new synthesis of theoretical positions, that will be welcomed by all students of media and cultural studies. Among its attributes are the following: -It provides an overview and evaluation of the key debates surrounding the definition of celebrity, its history, and its social and cultural function -It examines the 'celebrity industries’: the PR and publicity structures that manufacture celebrity -It looks at the cultural processes through which celebrity is consumed -It draws examples from the full range of contemporary media - film, television, newspapers, magazines and the web
This book presents a framework for thinking about different forms of internet celebrity that have emerged in the last decade. Through cross-cultural case studies, the book offers a brief history of internet celebrity; analysis on recent developments in the industry; and commentary on emergent trends.
Celebrity culture surrounds us. We are inundated with information about actors and actresses, athletes, musicians, and others who have become famous or infamous. Although we never will likely meet or get to know them, our interest in them seems boundless. We are literally obsessed with being entertained as well as with the people who entertain us. Who our celebrities are has also shifted; in the past, celebrity status was bestowed on men and women of great accomplishment, those who had given the world something to be proud of and to celebrate. Conversely, today’s celebrities are generally people involved in entertainment—from TV newscasters to people who appear on reality television programs, as well as some who are simply famous for being famous. What remains an enigma is why we, as a society, are so infatuated with being entertained, as well as with those who entertain us and appear in the media. This book makes sense of this spectacle by explaining the reasons for this obsession from a psychological, social, and historical perspective. It suggests that we have become addicted in much the same way that a person becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol. Finally, the author offers his observations on how to free our minds from this captivation. Anyone interested in understanding more about our need to live vicariously through the rich and famous will find answers in this book.
The first comprehensive survey of celebrity in the contemporary media.
"Acts as a concise introduction to the study of both contemporary and historical stardom and celebrity. Collecting together in one source companion an easily accessible range of readings surrounding stardom and celebrity culture, this book is a worthwhile addition to any library." - Kerry Gough, Birmingham City University "Absolutely wonderful. The inclusion of seminal works and more recent works makes this a very valuable read." - Beschara Karam, University of South Africa "An engaging and often insightful book." - Media International Australia This book brings together some of the seminal interventions which have structured the development of stardom and celebrity studies, while crucially combining and situating these within the context of new essays which address the contemporary, cross-media and international landscape of today's fame culture. From Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes to Catherine Lumby, Chris Rojek and Graeme Turner. At the core of the collection is a desire to map out a unique historical trajectory - both in terms of the development of fame, as well as the historical development of the field.
What is celebrity? How do celebrities influence society? Why do we hang on their every word, tweet or status update? Celebrity Cultures offers a fresh insight into the field of celebrity studies by updating existing debates and exploring recent developments. From the PR campaigns of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, this book critically evaluates a number of diverse celebrity case-studies and considers what they reveal about contemporary global society. Taking into account issues such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, economics, politics and the media, the book draws upon a range of cultural theorists including Theodore Adorno and Jean Baudrillard. Over the course of ten richly illustrated chapters, the book: Draws upon sociology, cultural theory, media analysis and celebrity commentary to explore and re-evaluate the study of celebrity. Examines the international appeal of celebrity including examples from India, China, South Korea and Indonesia. Includes chapter introductions identifying key points and annotated further reading suggestions. Celebrity Cultures is an invaluable resource for students of celebrity, media and cultural studies.
Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition’s examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today’s celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.
Celebrity culture has a pervasive presence in our everyday lives – perhaps more so than ever before. It shapes not simply the production and consumption of media content but also the social values through which we experience the world. This collection analyses this phenomenon, bringing together essays which explore celebrity across a range of media, cultural and political contexts. The authors investigate topics such as the intimacy of fame, political celebrity, stardom in American ‘quality’ television (Sarah Jessica Parker), celebrity 'reality' TV (I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!), the circulation of the porn star, the gallery film (David/David Beckham), the concept of cartoon celebrity (The Simpsons), fandom and celebrity (k.d. lang, *NSYNC), celebrity in the tabloid press, celebrity magazines (heat, Celebrity Skins), the fame of the serial killer and narratives of mental illness in celebrity culture. The collection is organized into four themed sections: Fame Now broadly examines the contemporary contours of fame as they course through new media sites (such as 'reality' TV and the internet) and different social, cultural and political spaces. Fame Body attempts to situate the star or celebrity body at the centre of the production, circulation and consumption of contemporary fame. Fame Simulation considers the increasingly strained relationship between celebrity and artifice and ‘authenticity’. Fame Damage looks at the way the representation of fame is bound up with auto-destructive tendencies or dissolution.
On television, in magazines and books, on the internet and in films, celebrities of all sorts seem to monopolize our attention. Celebrity Society brings new dimensions to our understanding of celebrity, capturing the way in which the figure of ‘the celebrity’ is bound up with the emergence of modernity. It outlines how the ‘celebrification of society’ is not just the twentieth-century product of Hollywood and television, but a long-term historical process, beginning with the printing press, theatre and art. By looking beyond the accounts of celebrity ‘culture’, Robert van Krieken develops an analysis of ‘celebrity society’, with its own constantly changing social practices and structures, moral grammar, construction of self and identity, legal order and political economy organized around the distribution of visibility, attention and recognition. Drawing on the work of Norbert Elias, the book explains how contemporary celebrity society is the heir (or heiress) of court society, taking on but also democratizing many of the functions of the aristocracy. The book also develops the idea of celebrity as driven by the ‘economics of attention’, because attention has become a vital and increasingly valuable resource in the information age. This engaging new book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in sociology, politics, history, celebrity studies, cultural studies, the sociology of media and cultural theory.
It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.