Joseph Epstein, a talented essayist, former American Scholar editor, and longtime professor at Northwestern University, published in the Weekly Standard in late 2005 a consideration of what he terms the “culture of celebrity.” Here is the opening passage:
CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it’s spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary American life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity.
The word “culture” no longer, I suspect, stands in most people’s minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand. Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, and slither and slide around, picking up all sorts of slippery and even goofy meanings. An icon, as we shall see, doesn’t stay a small picture of a religious personage but usually turns out nowadays to be someone with spectacular grosses. “The language,” as Flaubert once protested in his attempt to tell his mistress Louise Colet how much he loved her, “is inept.”
Today, when people glibly refer to “the corporate culture,” “the culture of poverty,” “the culture of journalism,” “the culture of the intelligence community”–and “community” has, of course, itself become another of those hopelessly baggy-pants words, so that one hears talk even of “the homeless community”–what I think is meant by “culture” is the general emotional atmosphere and institutional character surrounding the word to which “culture” is attached. Thus, corporate culture is thought to breed selfishness practiced at the Machiavellian level; the culture of poverty, hopelessness and despair; the culture of journalism, a taste for the sensational combined with a short attention span; the culture of the intelligence community, covering-one’s-own-behind viperishness; and so on. Culture used in this way is also brought in to explain unpleasant or at least dreary behavior. “The culture of NASA has to be changed,” is a sample of its current usage. The comedian Flip Wilson, after saying something outrageous, would revert to the refrain line, “The debbil made me do it.” So, today, when admitting to unethical or otherwise wretched behavior, people often say, “The culture made me do it.”
As for “celebrity,” the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one but rather closer to the one that Daniel Boorstin gave in his book The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream: “The celebrity,” Boorstin wrote, “is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness,” which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as “a celebrity is someone famous for being famous.” The other standard quotation on this subject is Andy Warhol’s “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” which also frequently turns up in an improved misquotation as “everyone will have his fifteen minutes of fame.”
But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn’t quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their well-knownness.
Click here to read the rest. Epstein goes on to make a distinction between fame and celebrity, with the former “based on true achievement.” The latter, Epstein argues, has “altered intellectual life.” Do you agree? Do you feel that the “culture of celebrity” has in some way changed the shape of the art world? If so, will that change be effected by our new economic climate? Does the “culture of celebrity” have a greater effect on young artists than old?
