Understanding Celebrity

Turner, Graeme

doi:10.4135/9781473957855

Cited by 166 publications

(111 citation statements)

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“…6 There is no place here for a continuing significant role for ascribed celebrity. Instead, Gamson (2011) follows Turner (2013) in holding that celebrity has been caught up in 'the demotic turn'. That is, the expansion of the popular into the category of general culture.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Niccolo Machiavelli, cultural intermediaries and the category of achieved celebrity

Rojek

2014

Celebrity Studies

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The escalating interest in celebrity studies has not translated into a serious enquiry into the origins of the subject in social and political theory. Instead, celebrity has been usually explained as either the reflection of industrialisation or the expression of timeless, unchanging fate. The result is a distorted, compressed time frame in which the phenomenon is located in unsatisfactory, metaphysical accounts of the position of celebrity in the social order. This paper aims to redress the balance by demonstrating the profound importance of cultural intermediaries in the social construction of celebrity. I argue that the birth of cultural intermediaries lies in Florentine civic humanism. Machiavelli's The Prince has been celebrated as a major contribution to the acquisition and effective management of tyrannical power. There is ample reason to hold this view. At the same time, this interpretation is too limiting. When read from the standpoint of the rise of Florentine civic humanism, the text is also, transparently, a contribution to the successful engineering of renown. More particularly, in this respect, it offers a prototypical understanding of cultural intermediaries. As such, this paper contends that Machiavelli's study is a seminal contribution to the study of celebrity. Machiavelli formulates impersonal principles on exposure management and the accumulation of attention capital that are presented as the preserve of civil experts. Far from being the high-water mark of tyrannical power, The Prince is evidence of the growth of civic humanism and the ascending importance of expertise in managing fame. The paper aims to revise the boundaries of celebrity studies by demonstrating the canonical significance of Machiavelli's text. Further, it proposes that cultural intermediaries are seminal in the emergence and development of the fame economy.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Niccolo Machiavelli, cultural intermediaries and the category of achieved celebrity

Rojek

2014

Celebrity Studies

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“…(Cashmore 2006, p. 3) Analysis of these more novel forms of celebrity has stressed the democratisation of fame, following the rise of reality TV (Biressi andNunn 2004, Turner 2010) and the simultaneous success of new celebrity media genres (Holmes 2005, McDonnell 2014 -with current practices within networked media as an extension, as well as a Celebrity Studies 55 fragmentation, of celebrity culture (Marwick and Boyd 2011). Additionally, the mediated focus on the private lives of famous people has been regarded as part of a process of 'tabloidisation', generally located in the last three decades of the twentieth century, and seen as a response to deregulation and competition for media audiences (for discussion, see Sparks 2000, Turner 2014, pp. 78-95, Johansson 2007a, pp.…”

Section: Celebrity Culture As a Conceptmentioning

confidence: 96%

Celebrity culture and audiences: a Swedish case study

Johansson

2015

Celebrity Studies

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This article examines how media consumers of different age, gender and socioeconomic backgrounds in Stockholm relate to and talk about celebrities and celebrity media. Based on 16 small focus groups with 17 year olds and 45-55 year olds, with male and female participants from working-class as well as academic backgrounds, I investigate a range of responses to celebrity content in connection with overall media developments in Sweden, in order to gain insights into what the contemporary cultural emphasis on celebrity can mean on an audience level within a particular context. Some of the pleasures gained from celebrity content but also elements of celebrity 'hatred' and experiences of media manipulation are explored. Likewise, some of the articulations of individual celebrities and celebrity media are discussed as interlinked with socially determined identity positions such as age, gender and social class.

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“…Originally Friedan was actively involved in the promotion of her blockbuster: 'I knew the book was big but it had to be promoted' (Wilkes 1970, p. 141) and, given that third party industry professionals are always central to the maintenance of celebrity (Turner 2014), she 'eventually browbeat Norton [her publisher] into paying a freelance publicist…'. Without what she sees as Friedan's aggressive intervention, that publicist argued, 'The book probably would have died on the shelves' (Wilkes 1970, p. 141).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Without what she sees as Friedan's aggressive intervention, that publicist argued, 'The book probably would have died on the shelves' (Wilkes 1970, p. 141). For Friedan, as for her fellow blockbuster authors, promotional activities such as book tours and television appearances on The Merv Griffin and David Frost programmes were not only about selling books -and herself as commodity (Turner 2014) -they were about selling her specific 'brand' of feminism. In terms of the blockbuster, these extra-textual performances, which are a 'critical component in any public figure's identity' (Marshall 2010, p. 39), work to frame the book and thus feminism in important ways.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Blockbuster’ celebrity feminism

Taylor

2014

Celebrity Studies

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Understanding Celebrity

Cited by 166 publications

References 0 publications

Niccolo Machiavelli, cultural intermediaries and the category of achieved celebrity

Niccolo Machiavelli, cultural intermediaries and the category of achieved celebrity

Celebrity culture and audiences: a Swedish case study

‘Blockbuster’ celebrity feminism

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