Celebrity by Chris Rojek (9781861891044)

Description - Celebrity by Chris Rojek

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.

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