Is celebrity an appropriate topic for academic discourse? Can an analysis of the ways in which celebrity is ‘produced and consumed’ – to use the jargon of cultural studies departments - deepen our understanding of social and political processes, or does it risk trivializing our engagement with history? In short, can historians talk about celebrity and still be taken seriously?
I only ask because issue two of a new journal, Celebrity Studies, has just arrived in my in-tray. The brainchild of two media studies academics, the journal’s entries this month include ‘hypertrophic celebrity in Victoria Beckham’ and ‘Gordon Brown and the work of emotion.’
No, I don’t know what ‘hypertrophic celebrity’ is either, nor how it came to be embodied in Victorian Beckham and, on a cursory reading, its easy to see how this stuff can earn academics a bad name. Certainly, that was the line the Independent took when Routledge launched the title, accusing the editors of ‘pseudo-academic mumbo jumbo’ and of taking the subject of celebrity too seriously.
Until last week, I would probably have been inclined to agree. Celebrities already take themselves seriously enough, thank you. The last thing they need is canonisation by academics too.
Following the latest revelations in the News Of The World phone-hacking saga, however, I am no longer so sure. For future political historians may well see January 28th, 2011 as the day when Rupert Murdoch’s grip on power suffered a fatal blow – all thanks to an obscure interior designer who also happens to be Sienna Miller’s step-mother. Yes, dear reader, like you (I hope) until last week I had never heard of Kelly Hoppen, but she’s certainly got my attention now.
If, as Hoppen’s lawyers’ allege, it turns out that NOTW was hacking her phone as recently as last March and that executives higher up the food chain knew about it, then News International’s claim that the phone-hacking was the work of one or two rogue reporters begins to wear increasingly thin, jeopardizing not just former executives on the paper but Murdoch’s strategy for taking majority control of Sky too. It’s a big if, of course. Murdoch may yet see off Hoppen and the other celebtoids nipping at his heels, but it will be a delicious irony should Hoppen – a product of today’s media obsession with celebrities – eventually prove to be Murdoch’s undoing. Murdoch’s papers have been able to make – and break – celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic for more than two decades now, but if the phone-hacking scandal demonstrates anything it’s that in the same period there’s been a slow but steady shift of power away from the media towards its Frankenstein-like creations.
Without coming over all ‘cultural studies’ about it, Hoppen et al are no longer just tame products to be consumed and discarded by an ‘omnipotent’ media, they are now themselves laying claim to that power by challenging the media’s right to intrude upon their lives and dictate their public identities.
Of course, the media isn’t the only field in which celebrities increasingly call the shots. From Hollywood, where ‘star’ actors get to green-light movies, to the catwalks of Milan and Paris where Victoria Beckham gets to decide which designers are ‘in’ this season, to charitable causes in Africa fronted by pop stars like Bono toting Louis Vuitton bags, the power of celebs is now everywhere on show.
As we have seen in California with the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger and, arguably, in London with Boris Johnson’s elevation to the mayoralty off the back of his comic turn on Have I Got News For You, it is also increasingly a short-cut to high political office.
As we have seen in California with the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger and, arguably, in London with Boris Johnson’s elevation to the mayoralty off the back of his comic turn on Have I Got News For You, it is also increasingly a short-cut to high political office.
There is nothing particularly new about this, of course. As Fred Inglis makes clear in his fascinating A Short History of Celebrity (if you’re going to write about celebrity and still want to be taken seriously as a historian ‘short’ is definitely the way to go) the modern production of celebrity can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Today, we have Katie Price and Damien Hirst. The 18th century equivalents were Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lord Byron. The democratisation of society in the Victorian period sealed the deal, turning celebrity into a commodity with mass appeal and making Florence Nightingale and Annie Oakley, the star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, household names.
Similarly, in my own period – the 1890s – I have been struck by how the Graphic and the Illustrated London News prefigured the productions of Heat and Hello, pioneering the use of photo-spreads celebrating the lives of Victorian actresses and minor members of the royal family. More than any other publication, it was, of course, the Daily Mail, launched in 1896, that ushered-in the era in which newspapers sought to confer celebrity on everyone from politicians to pantry maids, with Alfred Harmsworth playing the role of self-appointed puppet master-in-chief. The difference was that in 1920’s Harmsworth (by then Lord Northcliffe and also the proprietor of The Times) truly had a lock on the means of celebrity production, controlling 40 percent of the British newspaper market. That is a power that, today, Murdoch can only dream of.
