Product Description

Why aren't we all famous? Why do we desire and respect celebrities we have never met? Bard Pitt, Johnny Depp, Britney Spears and Janet Jackson are icons of popular culture and objects of desire for millions but, paradoxically, an essential feature of their popularity is their remoteness from our more ordinary world. Celebrities are everywhere, and nowhere. In this book, the author examines the meaning of celebrity. Drawing on a wide gallery of celebrities, from O.J. Simpson, Marilyn Monroe, David Bowie and Kurt Cobain to such notorious figures as Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy and the Soho bomber, David Copeland, he explores the friction between the public face of the celebrity and the celebrity's actual self. He argues that "ascribed" celebrity, which derives from bloodline, has been comprehensively replaced by "achieved" celebrity, the result of personal achievement, and he situates this development in the emergence of public life as a distinct sphere of society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52149 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
‘a necessary book’

The Australian, 3 July 2002
'a delightful social history of fame – a mix of cultural studies and social theory – that works very well'

Customer Reviews

indepth reading on celebrity image and media control.
This book provides information on a subject which hasn't really been written about in such subjective way before. Chris looks at the way in which the public adore the 'celebrity' and how the varying types of celebrity exsist. An idea which he plays with is the how celebrities are a consumer product and that the media construct images for them so they sell their music, flims. As a fashion student writting a dissertation on how image is constructed for celebrities from past amd present, this book has provided great reading material!

An essential read
A brilliant read for anyone who is writing about celebrity in today's society. Interesting, informative and compelling.