While the contemporary `cult of celebrity' has often been deplored, it has rarely been analyzed. Australian sociologist Robert van Krieken has decided to take celebrity seriously. Celebrity is the capacity to draw the attention of large numbers of people and to use their attention to one's own advantage. Celebrity is thus a form of capital that can be reproduced, invested and converted in other forms. Far from being new or even recent, celebrity culture - or as Van Krieken rather has it: celebrity society - dates back to 16th Century court society, where aristocratic courtiers had a vital interest in drawing and keeping the attention of the absolutist kings like Louis XIV. Since then, celebrity has been democratized. Practically anybody can nowadays aspire to fame and in principle even a nobody can attain it - if only for a brief moment. And celebrities have become quite dependent of the attention of their audiences. In a way, they are at the mercy of the sustained interest in them of millions and millions of people.
Van Krieken vividly reconstructs the historical stages of this `celebritization of society'.(The printing press, court society, English Restoration theatre, French salons, mass circulation newspapers, the advertising industry, radio, television, and of course the Internet all have their roles to play.) While doing so, he demonstrates that celebrity has become a vital function in post-industrial society. "As social life becomes denser, more competitive, more highly differentiated and more dependent on a variety of means of indirect communication, visibility beyond one's immediate circle of face-to-face contacts becomes increasingly significant and also increasingly lucrative, with the rewards attached to the accumulation of attention-capital expanding as the economic significance of attention-capital increases in a post-industrial knowledge and information society." In the future, pathways to fame will be even more meteoric than they are already; celebrity may become more volatile; yet audiences will be even wider than today and the principle of celebrity will have a bigger impact on us than ever.
This is a concise yet magisterial book, finally giving celebrity the serious sociological attention it deserves. Celebrity is here to stay - whether we like it or not. Instead of bemoaning it, we may better welcome Van Krieken's lucid analysis.
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Geert de Vries
Celebrity is here to stay
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2013Verified Purchase
