Thabiti Anyabwile is doing some very thoughtful work on this subject. Here’s a brief overview of his latest:
If you’re really interested in the cultural analysis of “celebrity,” you really need to read Daniel J. Boorstin‘s groundbreaking work, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), and Neal Gabler‘s Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.
Boorstin, as far as I can tell, introduces the term “celebrity” to the American landscape, defining it tautologically as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”
Gabler, more sanguine about the concept than Boorstin, thinks of “celebrity” as “an art form wrought in the medium of life.” Indeed, Gabler contends that “celebrity” is now the culture’s “dominant art form, not only in the attention it demands or in the way it subjugates other media but in the way it seems to refract so many of the basic concerns of the culture, precisely as art does.”
The “celebrity” Boorstin feared was the unmaking of the “great man,” Gabler hails as art refracting life. You couldn’t get two more opposing views. (To read Gabler’s engaging interaction with Boorstin, see here)
I’d like to propose a framework that posits something of a hybrid of Boorstin and Gabler. I’m not so much attempting to reconcile their views as much as use both men’s work as a way of illustrating two processes often conflated with bad results. I want to suggest a noble path to notoriety, and mirror it with the corrupt corridor to celebrity. Then I hope to say a word about how notoriety becomes “celebrity.”
