Page 150 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 135
object’s use-value compared with its status as a sign to be circulated,
creates a situation in which meaning is reduced to the recognition of
how different objects and people share a relationship within a
self-referential commodity system. Marx described the enigmatic
‘theological subtleties and metaphysical niceties’ (Marx [1887] 1983:
76) of the commodity form and Benjamin saw potential in the way
photography helped to explode conventional and the traditional
categories of experience. However, given the limitations of their
historical perspective, neither could foresee the ever more pervasive
and invasive ways in which commodity values would enter previously
insulated realms of culture. Against their better hopes, the close
alignment between media technologies and their commodified con-
tent has become increasingly resistant to any radical reinterpretation
and re-appropriation by the masses. Despite their betrayed hopes,
Benjamin’s notion of distraction, Kracauer’s concept of Ratio, Ador-
no’s culture industry, McLuhan’s medium is the (narcotic) message and
Debord’s society of the spectacle all retain their importance as terms with
which to revive a critical interrogation of the current mediascape
and the specific ideological role played by celebrity .
1

Fame in the age of mechanical reproduction

Just as in Highland Park, Michigan, Henry Ford’s Model Ts
began rolling off newly-developed assembly lines in their thou-
sands, starting around 1913, so the concept of mass production
began to be applied to movie stars. The entertainment business
became the first industry to treat the creation of fame as if it
were an industrial process.
(Gritten 2002: 19)
Celebrity is an industry like many others. Celebrities are
manufactured as attention-getting bodies, a process complicated
but not negated by the fact that celebrities are human beings.
Knownness itself is commodified within them.
(Gamson 1994: 105)
I am my own industry. I am my own commodity – Elizabeth
Taylor
(cited in Gamson 1994: 85)
We can see from Gritten’s above reference to Henry Ford’s Model T
(the first mass-produced motorcar) that the most significant distin-
guishing feature between modern celebrity and other modes of
social renown from previous epochs is its newly industrialized nature.
As Gamson then points out, the consequence of this industrialization
is that aspects of social life that were formerly exclusively cultural,
now become commodified. In Kracauer’s previously discussed terms,

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