When future historians study these troubled times, they will marvel at the relentless rise of sea levels, strongman politics and Kardashians. The fame-babies of a double murder (their father Robert Kardashian represented O. J. Simpson), the Kardashians and their extension pack, the Jenners, morphed from Los Angeles socialites into seemingly inevitable magnets of scandal, desire and money. Kim set the pace with a leaked sex tape in 2007, teaching the clan to cheerfully break the boundaries of good taste and common sense, to absorb the energy of the world’s criticism and translate it into cash. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a reality show centred on the lives and careers of the family, first aired in late 2007 and is now in its sixteenth series. In 2014, Kim posed for Paper Magazine holding a champagne bottle, the foamy liquid squirting over her head and into the glass perched on her extended backside. Critics noted the channelling of the eighteenth-century Khoikhoi woman Sara “Saartjie” Baartman and debated whether Kim understood that she was the butt of an old racist joke. That year she made $28 million, overtaking Meryl Streep, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling on Forbes’s list of highest-paid celebrities. Her little sister, meanwhile, plumped her lips with filler, lied about it, and became the unwitting namesake of the “Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge”, in which masses of people pressed their lips into shot glasses, sucked as hard as possible, and then recoiled in horror at their own self-mutilation. Kylie responded by selling lipstick and, at twenty-one, quietly became the world’s youngest billionaire. No doubt the gang’s current racket hawking laxative teas, diet lollipops and candy-coloured vitamins will leap right over the naysayers and fuddy-duddys to reach the kids who can truly appreciate it. Like Antaeus drawing his fighting strength from the earth, the family is invigorated by Mother Notoriety, growing more powerful every time it seems to fall.
The Kardashian-Jenners have all the external trappings of charisma without its sacred core. This makes them useful for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity, much as a body whose soul has departed is handier for studying anatomy. They are famous for being famous, but why, after all, are they famous? Why, of all the personal stylists, exhibitionists and rich kids in Calabasas, CA, did they become such magnets for attention? You may not be one of Kim’s 143 million Instagram followers but you do know who she is.
There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.
The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.
In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.
Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.
by Irina Dumitrescu, TLS | Read more:
The Kardashian-Jenners have all the external trappings of charisma without its sacred core. This makes them useful for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity, much as a body whose soul has departed is handier for studying anatomy. They are famous for being famous, but why, after all, are they famous? Why, of all the personal stylists, exhibitionists and rich kids in Calabasas, CA, did they become such magnets for attention? You may not be one of Kim’s 143 million Instagram followers but you do know who she is.There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.
The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.
In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.
Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.
by Irina Dumitrescu, TLS | Read more:
Image: Kevin Tachman/MG19/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
