Page 167 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Audience, Performance, and Celebrity 151

followers to undertake enormous, difficult ventures in the name of the
progressive anti - monarchial ideas he promoted. The Roman writer Ovid
was a talented poet who enjoyed notoriety for writing books about how to
pick up servant girls in the Coliseum, a rather different version of conquest.
Madame de Stael and Mabel Dodge were talented thinkers and cultural
leaders who earned celebrity by hosting salons where intellectuals, artists,
and bohemians congregated. William Jennings Bryan and Emma Goldman
were both celebrity public speakers on political and social issues whose
talent earned fame and even notoriety.
Fame and celebrity have evolved and changed with the emergence of
new media such as television, magazines, and the Internet. One conse-
quence of the multiplication of media in a capitalist economic context that
thrives on the sale of cultural news to consumers in the form of magazines
such as Spin or television shows such as Access Hollywood is that the reasons
for celebrity status have become separated from talent. The maintenance
of such status has also become more explicitly commercial in motivation.
Rudolph Valentino was such a popular celebrity actor in the 1920s that
when he died, thousands of women lined up in New York City to view his

coffin, but he was a talented actor. Paris Hilton cannot make a similar
claim, although her television show, The Simple Life , which mocked the
idea of the “ dumb blonde, ” entertained with mildly self - mocking irony.
Princess Diana ’ s status as a celebrity was less linked to public achievement
or to a demonstrable talent in some area of life. She had married a prince
and been brave enough to leave him when it was clear there was no love
in the match, and that certainly took courage. And her courage further
manifested itself in her willingness to engage in physical contact with ostra-
cized people with diseases such as AIDS whose illness provoked fear in
others. But such courage followed on her celebrity and was not the occa-
sion for it. It was of a different order from the talent of a singer such as
Madonna or an actor such as Kate Winslet. What scholars have noted
regarding modern celebrity is that rather than be a matter of achievement
or talent or distinction alone, it is accompanied, augmented, and sustained
by marketing. In the case of Paris Hilton, marketing seems to have created
her celebrity, although blonde good looks might also be considered as
much a natural talent as being born with a good singing voice. In the mar-
keting of celebrity, the celebrity is tracked as usual in the celebrity press,
but the normal pursuit of information is thought of now in terms of the
sale of advertising revenue in magazines or entertainment news shows.
The celebrity is on the covers of magazines as much to attract readers as