La mítica Ivana Trump, participante del reciente programa televisivo inglés Celebrity Big Brother (Gran Hermano para famosos), posa en una clase de pintura para el resto de los concursantes.
Tocho, siempre atento al arte contemporáneo
sábado, 23 de enero de 2010
viernes, 22 de enero de 2010
Curro González: LBI ((La broma infinita) 2009)
Recomendado por Helena Tatay (www.blablart.com)
Véanse más animaciones en: http://currogonzalez.com/
John Cale & Lou Reed: Open House (1990)
De Songs from Drella (Sire Records)
O viaje a los infiernos, parte 2.
Viaje a los infiernos
Campos Flegreos, donde Zeus enterró a los Titanes
Antro de la Sibila, y entrada al Hades
Lago Averno y otra entrada al HadesDe aquí a una semana el blog volverá a interrumpirse.
Un grupo de profesores y de estudiantes de una asignatura de libre elección, titulada Viaje a los Infiernos, partiremos a Nápoles.
El motivo del viaje no es arquitectónico o urbanístico: no se trata de estudiar la villa romana, el urbanismo de las colonias griegas y romano, o la confrontación entre la etrusca Capua y la griega Cumas, sino de ver un paisaje que ha ejercitado una influencia decisiva en Occidente. La suerte del pensamiento occidental se ha derimido precisamente en Nápoles.
Nápoles (Neapolis) es una colonia griega cuyo trazado urbanístico perdura íntegro en la actual conformación de las calles.
Pero la importancia de esta ciudad y sus alrededores son los múltiples accidentes volcánicos -que no se limitan al Vesubio- que, desde la época tardía, fueron considerados como entradas a los infiernos: el lago Averno y las cuevas que lo rodean, los aún humeantes Campos Flegreos (bajo los que Zeus enterró a los Titanes) y múltiples volcanes (entre los que se halla el Vesubio).
Era lógico que este paisaje, compuesto de quietas aguas negras, bosques umbríos, tierras cenicientas y montes humeantes, acogiera múltiples cultos a divinidades infernales y enmarcara ritos en los que quedada patente la preocupación por el más allá y el destino humano tras la muerte.
La isla de Ischia, en la bahía de Nápoles, acogió la primera colonia griega, en el siglo VIII aC. A partir de este enclave, los colonos griegos empezaron a fundar toda una serie de colonias en el sur de Italia y en Sicilia (Nápoles, Cumas, Paestum, Metaponto, Crotona, Taranto, Agrigento, Siracusa, etc.).
El sur de Italia (llamado la Magna Grecia), por tanto, fue una de las cunas de la cultura griega, junto con Jonia, en la costa turca, y la Grecia continental.
Jonia y la Magna Grecia constituyeron dos mundos antitéticois que dieron lugar a dos concepciones opuestas del mundo en el período arcáico: uno, generado en Jonia, puso en duda la explicación mítica del origen del mundo, creada en la Grecia continental, y trató de explicar el universo y su creación a partir, no de la acción de divinidades, sino de las relaciones de atracción y repulsión entre elementos constituyentes básicos, dando lugar a lo que en ocasiones se ha considerado una explicación científica del mundo: el análisis de los pensadores o la escuela de Mileto, para quienes no fueron los dioses los causantes del mundo y, por tanto, no era el cielo sino la tierra visible el tema de estudio o preocupación del hombre. Su vida dependía de lo que acontecía en su alrededor.
Por el contrario, una tierra propicia a inquietudes sobre la suerte después de la muerte, dio lugar a reflexiones que nada tenían que ver con lo visible sino con lo que acontece más allá, y acogió a pensadores preocupados por el ultramundo y la lógica de lo invisible.
Parménides y Pitágoras fueron dos de los más destacados pensadores, formados en la Magna Grecia, de lo que Aristóteles llamó "la escuela italiana filosófica". Pitágoras fue, en verdad, el primero que acuñó el término filósofo, centrándose en las razones ocultas que explican la consistencia, armonía y belleza del mundo, y en el destino más allá del mundo visible, es decir en el destino del alma, de su vida ultraterrena. De este modo, anunció, por vez primera, que el alma no solo era inmortal (algo que los egipcios y los mazdeistas sabían), sino que transmigraba (como los budistas anunciaban).
La belleza del mundo, más allá de las apariencias que tanto fascinaban a los pensadores jonios: belleza quer debía tener razones invisibles, residentes en el más allá, el cielo o el Hades, hacia donde el alma partía o retornaba tras su vida en el mundo de las ilusiones. Éste era el tema que centraba las preocupaciones de Pitágoras.
Halló la razón o el fundamento de la belleza. Su dios personal le ayudó.
Pitágoras había nacido en la isla de Samos y, tras, un largo viaje de iniciación (según cuentan las leyendas) por Egipto, Persia y la India, llegó (esto sí es histórico) a la Magna Grecia. Su nacimiento fue precedido de señales que anunciaban la llegada de un profeta: fue la Pitia, la sacerdotisa de Apolo en Delfos (Pitia viene de Pitón, el monstruo, símbolo de la noche y las fuerzas de ultratumba, asentadas desde la noche de los tiempos en Delfos, con el que Apolo, que encarnaba la luz y el orden -impuestos a sangre y fuego-, luchó antes de y para poder asentarse a los pies del Parnaso) quien reveló a la madre de Pitágoras -que, literamente, significa anunciado por la Pitia-, el nacimiento y el destino de su hijo.
Pitágoras y la secta pitagórica que le seguía eran devotos de Apolo. Apolo reinaba en el sur de Italia. El mítico antro de la Sibila -donde la Sibila, una profetisa de Apolo, reinaba desde los orígenes del mundo-, bajo un templo de Apolo, que era también la entrada a los infiernos, se hallaba al sur de Neápolis (Nápoles) (En verdad, el llamado antro de la Sibila no es el que Virgilio describe en la Enéida, sino que posiblemente sea una estructura militar; la o las Sibilas no fueron figuras históricas sino legendarias. Pero el templo de Apolo, en el que predicaba una sacerdotisa, sí es real y se halla precisamente en la colina recorrida por el extraño pasadizo que conduce a una cueva, desde muy antiguo considerada com el antro de la Sibila que Virgilio narró. Hoy se piensa que Virgilio se inspiró en unas cuevas, habilitadas militarmente por los romanos, que miran al lago Averno).
El que la entrada de los infiernos se situara, en el imaginario greco-latino, cerca de un templo de Apolo no era extraño. Apolo no era una divinidad funeraria. Pero, en tanto que pronosticaba el porvenir, podía ver allí donde la vista no alcanza, es decir, hasta lo hondo del país de los muertos. Su hermano, Hermes, era la única divinidad que podía entrar en y salir de los infiernos, y guiaba a las almas hacia las puertas defendidas por el can Cerbero.
Apolo fue la divinidad que dio sentido al mundo. Que lo ordenó. Es decir que asentó cada cosa en su sitio, delimitó los espacios, y estableció relaciones armónicas, es decir, matemáticas, entre todo lo que configura en universo. El lema que coronaba el templo de Apolo en Delfos ya lo proclamaba: conoce tus límites. Nada sin medida; sin contención, mesura. Apolo sabía que el ordenamiento del mundo, que le permitía luchar con el caos (el magna informe de los inicios) y oponerse a él, se basaba en la definición o delimitación de cada parte del mundo y de su juicioso emplazamiento. El desorden, es decir trazas equivocadas o ausencia de límites, no debían imperar.
Pitágoras adoraba a Apolo en tanto que divinidad arquitecta, divinidad que ordenaba el mundo, mundo ordenado a partir de razones o leyes que primeramente se aplicaron en el cielo -y que los movimientos cíclicos de los astros reflejaban- y, posteriormente, se reflejaron en la tierra.
Las verdaderas razones se hallaban, sin embargo, más allá del mundo visible. Y su acceso a éstas solo se podía producir tras la muerte. Para que el mundo tuviera sentido, es decir estuviera ordenado, era necesario que se pudiera tener acceso a dichas razones. Por esto, el alma debía ser inmortal, para poder sortear la barrera de la muerte.
Pítágoras halló el sentido del mundo, y las razones de su belleza. Lo que lo condujo a este descubrimiento -las leyes armónicas, los fundamentos matemáticos gracias a los cuales se podía emplazar con exactitud cada cosa en su sitio, y armonizarlas en un todo coherente- fueron los cultos mistéricos arcáicos (que los órficos, cercanos a los pitagóricos, aunque seguidores de Dionisos, que no de Apolo, prosiguieron), preocupados por la suerte del alma tras la muerte, generados por el paisaje infernal de la región de Nápoles, en medio del cual el ser humano siempre se ha interrogado sobre la brevedad y la falta de sentido de la vida que un simple soplo, exhalado por la tierra ardiente, puede fulminar.
Ésta es la razón del viaje a los infiernos;: un viaje hacia nosotros mismos.
jueves, 21 de enero de 2010
Fritz Lang: House by the River (1950)
La mejor película de Fritz Lang. Se halla entera, dividida en nueve partes, en www.youtube.com
miércoles, 20 de enero de 2010
Patrick Doan (Defasten): Strange Days
DEFASTEN / EXPOSITION "STRANGE DAYS" from LE CUBE on Vimeo.
http://www.lesiteducube.com/?id_page=545
Arquitecto y artista multi-media, Patrick Dean es un joven canadiense cuya obra trata el tema de la relación entre el hombre y la ciudad (real y representada)
Vidas ejemplares (de arquitectos): Brad Pitt y Carla Bruni
Un caluroso 5 de julio de 1996, por la mañana, cambió para siempre el rumbo de la arquitectura. Tenía lugar en Barcelona la convención de la UIA, la Unión Internacional de Arquitectos, que convoca a todos los profesionales del mundo. Acudieron no sé cuantos arquitectos de todas partes. Se organizaron conferencias, seminarios, ponencias, exposiciones.
Entre estas sesiones destacaba la que Sir Norman Foster iba a presidir y protagonizar en la Escuela de Arquitectura de Barcelona. Era verano; la universidad estaba vacía; los estudiantes habían regresado a sus casas, a menudo fuera de Barcelona. No se esperaba una asistencia especial.
Entre estas sesiones destacaba la que Sir Norman Foster iba a presidir y protagonizar en la Escuela de Arquitectura de Barcelona. Era verano; la universidad estaba vacía; los estudiantes habían regresado a sus casas, a menudo fuera de Barcelona. No se esperaba una asistencia especial.
Cuando Sir Norman Foster apareció, en mangas de camisa, se desató el delirio. Miles de estudiantes que abarrotaban la sala se precipitaron sobre él. Le pedían autógrafos, se hacían fotos, querían tocarlo. Gritos, desmayos, en una sala ecalentada. Ni la aparición de David Bisbal habría desatado semejante pasión.
El universo de las celebrities había llegado por fin a la arquitectura. Sir Norman Foster había entrado en otra galaxia: la de las personas conocidas no por lo que hacen, sino por lo que viven, por lo que hacen con sus vidas: acababa de casarse con una célebre sexóloga española, una figura popular por un programa que dirigía en televisión. Viajaba en jet privado, contruía por todo el mundo, y se había quedado con la más guapa.
¿Inauguró Sir Norman Foster una nueva era? Bernini, en el siglo XVII, y Le Corbusier en el XX, explotaron la fama; pero los medios, ínfimos, no eran los mismos.
Es cierto, sin embargo, que tres años antes de la aparición triunfal de Sir Norman Foster, la boda de Ricardo Bofill Jr con Chabeli Iglesias ya logró que la prensa rosa fijara por fin en los arquitectos.
Desde entonces, el fenómeno no ha decaído. Una diva como Zaha Hadid, inicialmente más conocida por sus humores que por sus obras (inexistentes), logra que todos nos precipitemos sobre las revistas.
Sabemos que si queremos llenar una sala de conferencias y paralizar la universidad -un criterio a la hora de aprobar actividades culturales- tenemos que recurrir a grandes arquitectos como Brad Pitt, que construye en Nueva Orleans, y sobre todo a Carla Bruni, que estudió arquitectura (aunque no concluyó la carrera). Desde luego, lo dejo todo para estar en primera fila.
Acerca de este cambio en el mundo del arte, léase el artículo fundamental de:
GABLER, Neal: "Celebrity. The Greatest Show on Earth", Newsweek, 21 de diciembre de 2009, ps. 55-58
Texto de teoría del arte y de estética contemporánea de lectura obligatoria, imprescindible para entender el arte y el entretenimiento de hoy en día, que analiza la figura y la importancia de las celebrities (los famosos): figuras que tienen más valor o importancia, que afectan más nuestra vida, que las figuras de ficción, porque son reales, no simulan las acciones, y tienen un comportamiento imprevisible que logra que estemos siempre pendientes del capítulo siguiente de sus vidas.
Además viven una vida envidiable, sin ser, en apariencia, distinto de nosotros, por lo que podemos proyectarnos en ellos, o vernos reflejados en ellos. Las celebrities -que se diferencian de las personas conocidas, pero cuyas vidas no interesan- no son solo protagonistas de un relato, sino que son el mismo relato que protagonizan. Su "importancia" no reside en ellos mismos sino en su vida. Geno y figura. No existen independientemente de las acciones que emprenden (bodas, divorcios, partos, liposucciones, operaciones, etc.)
El artículo se basa en celebrities norteamericanas, pero los ejemplos españoles son perfectamente adaptables. A la última novia de Tiger Woods se la puede reemplazar por cualquier Ania de Gran Hermano, aunque, seguramente, Belén Esteban, tan nuestra, es incomparable.
"By now you've probably heard of or seen Jaimee Grubbs explaining that her relationship was emotional, not just physical, or Mindy Lawton describing an attraction to red underwear, or Jamie Jungers revealing who underwrote her liposuction. They are everywhere on tabloid television shows, personal-interest magazines, and supermarket scandal sheets. And just who are Jaimee Grubbs, Mindy Lawton, and Jamie Jungers? They are three of Tiger Woods's alleged mistresses—women with no ostensible talent or accomplishment to justify the attention save to expose their private lives for our titillation. In short, they are the epitome of modern celebrity.
That isn't a compliment. "Celebrity" has become a tarnished word, for which we may largely credit the late Daniel Boorstin, the eminent historian who defined it in The Image, his 1961 survey of what he saw as the devolution of America. "The celebrity," Boorstin proclaimed, "is a person who is known for his well-knownness." Boorstin was writing at a time of great cultural flux, with the rise of the mass media and an effulgence of what he considered trash, and he placed celebrity within the larger context of an America whose citizens were increasingly enthralled by imitations of reality rather than by reality itself—by the pretense of substance without the actual substance. He coined the term "pseudo-event" to describe counterfeit happenings like press conferences, photo ops, and movie premieres that existed only to advertise themselves. He called celebrities human pseudo-events: hollow façades illuminated by publicity. So it has been ever since.
But there is a less antiquated and reproachful perspective on celebrity—one that may help explain why Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and now the new and revised Tiger Woods seem so embedded in the national consciousness. In this view, celebrity isn't an anointment by the media of unworthy subjects, even though it may seem so when you think of minor celebs such as Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, or Levi Johnston, or the gate-crashing Salahis. It is actually a new art form that competes with—and often supersedes—more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays, and TV shows (and the occasional golf tournament), and that performs, in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community. I would even argue that celebrity is the great new art form of the 21st century.
To be honest, I didn't escape the temptation to trivialize celebrity myself when I wrote my own analysis 10 years ago in my book Life the Movie. I called celebrities not human pseudo-events but "human entertainments"—not people who existed to be publicized but people whose lives seemed to exist to provide us with ongoing amusement. By this analysis, celebrities weren't just awarded publicity for no good reason; they received publicity because they provided narratives for us. Michael Jackson's life was a long, fascinating soap opera that included not only his success but also his tiffs with his family, his erratic behavior, his plastic surgeries, his bizarre marriages, his masked children, his brushes with the law, his alleged drug use, and finally his mysterious death. Ditto the life of Britney or Oprah or Brad and Angelina or anyone, even Jon and Kate Gosselin, whose personal activities provide us with entertainment.
But what I failed to appreciate then is that human entertainment is not simply a carnival personified. In fact, celebrity really isn't a person. Celebrity is more like a vast, multicharacter show, albeit with a star, only it is performed in the medium of life rather than on screens or on the stage and then retailed in other media. No media, no celebrity. Technically speaking, then, celebrities don't have narratives. Celebrity is narrative, even though we understandably conflate the protagonist of the narrative with the narrative itself and use the terms interchangeably. That is why one can be famous, as Queen Elizabeth is, without necessarily being a celebrity, as Princess Di was. One has name recognition, the other a narrative.
To see the truth of this, you can apply a very simple test. A so-called celebrity is a celebrity only so long as he or she is living out an interesting narrative, or at least one the media find interesting. Indeed, even non-entertainers or people not ordinarily in the public eye can be grazed by the celebrity spotlight if they live a compelling-enough narrative, which is how a Joey Buttafuoco or a Nadya Suleman or even one of Tiger's mistresses receives celebrity treatment. Typically, the size of the celebrity is in direct proportion to the novelty and excitement of the narrative—to wit, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. When an individual loses his or her narrative or the narrative becomes attenuated, the celebrity vanishes—the equivalent of a movie or a novel that bores you. He or she is relegated to "Where are they now?"
This still doesn't account for the popularity of celebrity in a world where there are so many narratives to choose from, so many different forms of entertainment. Here Boorstin may have an answer. One of his complaints in The Image was that the democratization of culture had marginalized older art forms that could no longer satisfy a larger public as fully as the new ones did. He cited the movies as having driven the novel into psychology because the movies had preempted action and did it better than novels could, whereas the movies were less capable of plumbing inner depths. That left novels with a new franchise but with a significantly smaller readership.
Something similar seems to have happened in the competition between celebrity and other, older art forms. So many of our movies, novels, plays, and television programs have subsisted on providing us with verisimilitude so that we feel what we are watching or reading is real; with identification so that we either believe the people whom we are watching or about whom we are reading are like us or like our fantasies; with stakes so that we imagine what happens to them really matters; and with suspense so that we are riveted because we need to know what is going to happen next. These are the staples of entertainment.
Given these ingredients, celebrity has tremendous advantages over its more traditional, and fictional, competitors. For one thing, celebrity doesn't have to create the pretense of reality; it is real. The stories are enacted in life, which is why, aside from the inherent drama of hookups and breakups, sex has featured so prominently in celebrity narratives. (So has violence.) There is an almost voyeuristic frisson in knowing that this isn't simulated as it is in the movies. Nor does celebrity have to labor at creating identification; celebrity protagonists are almost, by definition, culturally preselected on the basis that we identify with them (Everyman) or enjoy a vicarious attachment through them (Superman). And because there are real consequences to the events in the narratives—people actually divorce or fall off the wagon or die—something is always at stake. We don't have to suspend our disbelief.
Finally, celebrity possesses suspense that older forms can only manufacture. That's because traditional forms have closure—an ending when you turn the last page or when the lights go up or when the credits roll. But celebrity narratives have no final chapter. We don't know whether Brad and Angelina will stay together or have more children or cheat on one another or decide to join a monastery. We don't know what new revelations will arise about Tiger Woods. We don't even know the truth about Michael Jackson's death yet. We are always awaiting the next installment: the next romance, drug binge, arrest, incarceration, mental breakdown, pregnancy, accident—you name it.
And all this provides yet another, extra-aesthetic satisfaction that conventional entertainments can seldom supply. Long before celebrity reached its apotheosis, the great gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, who purveyed the malfeasance and transgressions of the rich, the famous, and the powerful to tens of millions of Americans, understood that celebrity was a basis for an ongoing, daily national conversation that also served as therapy to a wounded country, albeit with a savage subtext of revenge. Reaching his own peak in the Depression '30s at a time of anxiety and fractiousness, Winchell managed to unify his readers and listeners around his narratives, not only distracting them from calamity but also giving them a rallying point of common reference that was every bit as powerful as the national symbolism that FDR promoted. Winchell turned us into a nation of yentas.
This function is especially potent today in another time of uncertainty and division, when Americans are not only disunited over politics and values, but also share fewer and fewer common experiences. In the past, television, movies, music, even books were sources of national cohesion. Dramatically lower ratings for broadcast television, reduced film attendance, and plummeting CD sales have all loosened the national bonds. We have become a nation of niches. Celebrity is one of the few things that still crosses all lines. As disparate and stratified as Americans are, practically all of them seem to share an intense engagement, or at the very least an acquaintance, with the sagas of Jon and Kate or Brad and Angelina or Jennifer and whomever, which is oddly comforting. These are America's modern denominators, and in some ways Jon and Kate are our Fred and Ginger—not, obviously, talentwise, but in the way they provide escape and give us something we can all talk about.
Still, it denigrates our favorite movies, television shows, novels, and plays to think of them as merely providing us with mindless escapism or subjects for conversation. Like all good art, the best of them resonate with us because they provide us with life lessons or because they capture the cultural moment or because they give us a glimpse of transcendence or because they stimulate the imagination. The best of celebrity has that capacity too, and just as the most complex films, novels, and plays have layers of meaning and even profound truths, so do the best and longest-lasting celebrity narratives, like Jackson's or Marilyn Monroe's or the Kennedy family's. These themes can convert a celebrity narrative from fact to metaphor, from entertainment to art, from gossip to an epic novel.
Reading People or Us or Perez Hilton, we learn variously about the joys of new love and the hurts of the old, the satisfactions of parenthood, the wages of sin, the punishment for hubris, the drawbacks to fame as well as its blessings, the risk of losing yourself and the exhilaration of finding yourself, and, perhaps above all, the things that really matter in life and the things that don't, which means that celebrity, far from being a shallow artifice, often addresses the fundamental differences between the real and the false, the meaningful and the meaningless. These are the concerns to which we have always turned to art to explain. Even the Speidi story has a postmodernist subtext about identity, reinvention, the lust for fame, and envy that tells us something significant about ourselves and our society if we have the tenacity to dissect it.
In effect, then, we have invented celebrity and latched onto it because celebrity does a better job of giving us what traditional art and entertainments once gave us before they became too enervated to surprise us or we became too jaded to be surprised. By the same token, in a symbiotic turn, many protagonists of celebrity narratives have become sophisticated enough to realize that they could recast their narratives as a way of sustaining their own celebrity, turning their life into their work. One will never know how much of Michael Jackson's eccentricity was a way to keep his narrative (and his celebrity) going, though we can be fairly certain that his decision to return to performing was intended as another chapter in his story: Michael's Comeback! We don't know how much of Lindsay Lohan's behavior is a way to keep herself in the public eye when she has no movies to do so. And we don't know how much Madonna's abrupt career changes and public romances are her way of manipulating celebrity to her benefit. We do know the effect.
On the other hand, even people who seem to resist creating narratives that might attract tabloid attention, a grande dame like Meryl Streep or a Hollywood nice guy like Tom Hanks, are sucked into the celebrity narrative vortex not because their lives are especially salacious or sensational but because their enormous talent and their success are themselves stories about which people want to hear or read. The Los Angeles Times recently ran a front-page article on Streep for no other reason than that she is America's most celebrated actress—a small narrative fillip. The story of developing talent and succeeding with it is a standard celebrity tale—though, as Tiger Woods discovered, the bland success story can rapidly transmogrify into an entirely different sort of narrative when more prurient elements present themselves. In any case, celebrity casts a wide net—not just pathology but also "feel-good." To which one could add this irony: J. D. Salinger is a celebrity largely by creating a narrative in which he abjures not only celebrity but also society.
The upshot is that celebrity narratives today are so effective, so ubiquitous, and so vigorous that they overwhelm virtually every other entertainment and art form, even the ones in which entertainers originally made their names. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, to use just one example, are far better known for their life together than for the films they make, and there is no doubt that more people read about them or watch their exploits on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood than attend their films. One might even say that their lives are such a big entertainment that their films are now a product of their celebrity rather than a source for it, to the point where their celebrity narratives can actually obscure their work, making it harder for an audience to accept them as the characters they play.
Yet it is not only that celebrity has triumphed over more traditional forms; it has, like cultural kudzu, subordinated the media generally. Since celebrity is a narrative in the medium of life, it requires magazines, newspapers, television shows, and perhaps most especially the Internet to promote it—a service these media happily perform and from which they get great residual benefits. As a result, the media are filled with celebrity narratives, constantly hawking them so that celebrity is to America today what the movies and television were to earlier generations, only more so. It is almost as if celebrity hangs ever-present in the ether where no previous entertainment has ever existed. We practically breathe it.
And so today we are gripped by Tiger Woods's story, and when his disappears, as it eventually will, another narrative will arrive and then another and then another, ad infinitum. That is how celebrity works—as a kind of endless daisy chain that amuses us, unifies us, and even occasionally educates us".
That isn't a compliment. "Celebrity" has become a tarnished word, for which we may largely credit the late Daniel Boorstin, the eminent historian who defined it in The Image, his 1961 survey of what he saw as the devolution of America. "The celebrity," Boorstin proclaimed, "is a person who is known for his well-knownness." Boorstin was writing at a time of great cultural flux, with the rise of the mass media and an effulgence of what he considered trash, and he placed celebrity within the larger context of an America whose citizens were increasingly enthralled by imitations of reality rather than by reality itself—by the pretense of substance without the actual substance. He coined the term "pseudo-event" to describe counterfeit happenings like press conferences, photo ops, and movie premieres that existed only to advertise themselves. He called celebrities human pseudo-events: hollow façades illuminated by publicity. So it has been ever since.
But there is a less antiquated and reproachful perspective on celebrity—one that may help explain why Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and now the new and revised Tiger Woods seem so embedded in the national consciousness. In this view, celebrity isn't an anointment by the media of unworthy subjects, even though it may seem so when you think of minor celebs such as Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, or Levi Johnston, or the gate-crashing Salahis. It is actually a new art form that competes with—and often supersedes—more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays, and TV shows (and the occasional golf tournament), and that performs, in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community. I would even argue that celebrity is the great new art form of the 21st century.
To be honest, I didn't escape the temptation to trivialize celebrity myself when I wrote my own analysis 10 years ago in my book Life the Movie. I called celebrities not human pseudo-events but "human entertainments"—not people who existed to be publicized but people whose lives seemed to exist to provide us with ongoing amusement. By this analysis, celebrities weren't just awarded publicity for no good reason; they received publicity because they provided narratives for us. Michael Jackson's life was a long, fascinating soap opera that included not only his success but also his tiffs with his family, his erratic behavior, his plastic surgeries, his bizarre marriages, his masked children, his brushes with the law, his alleged drug use, and finally his mysterious death. Ditto the life of Britney or Oprah or Brad and Angelina or anyone, even Jon and Kate Gosselin, whose personal activities provide us with entertainment.
But what I failed to appreciate then is that human entertainment is not simply a carnival personified. In fact, celebrity really isn't a person. Celebrity is more like a vast, multicharacter show, albeit with a star, only it is performed in the medium of life rather than on screens or on the stage and then retailed in other media. No media, no celebrity. Technically speaking, then, celebrities don't have narratives. Celebrity is narrative, even though we understandably conflate the protagonist of the narrative with the narrative itself and use the terms interchangeably. That is why one can be famous, as Queen Elizabeth is, without necessarily being a celebrity, as Princess Di was. One has name recognition, the other a narrative.
To see the truth of this, you can apply a very simple test. A so-called celebrity is a celebrity only so long as he or she is living out an interesting narrative, or at least one the media find interesting. Indeed, even non-entertainers or people not ordinarily in the public eye can be grazed by the celebrity spotlight if they live a compelling-enough narrative, which is how a Joey Buttafuoco or a Nadya Suleman or even one of Tiger's mistresses receives celebrity treatment. Typically, the size of the celebrity is in direct proportion to the novelty and excitement of the narrative—to wit, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. When an individual loses his or her narrative or the narrative becomes attenuated, the celebrity vanishes—the equivalent of a movie or a novel that bores you. He or she is relegated to "Where are they now?"
This still doesn't account for the popularity of celebrity in a world where there are so many narratives to choose from, so many different forms of entertainment. Here Boorstin may have an answer. One of his complaints in The Image was that the democratization of culture had marginalized older art forms that could no longer satisfy a larger public as fully as the new ones did. He cited the movies as having driven the novel into psychology because the movies had preempted action and did it better than novels could, whereas the movies were less capable of plumbing inner depths. That left novels with a new franchise but with a significantly smaller readership.
Something similar seems to have happened in the competition between celebrity and other, older art forms. So many of our movies, novels, plays, and television programs have subsisted on providing us with verisimilitude so that we feel what we are watching or reading is real; with identification so that we either believe the people whom we are watching or about whom we are reading are like us or like our fantasies; with stakes so that we imagine what happens to them really matters; and with suspense so that we are riveted because we need to know what is going to happen next. These are the staples of entertainment.
Given these ingredients, celebrity has tremendous advantages over its more traditional, and fictional, competitors. For one thing, celebrity doesn't have to create the pretense of reality; it is real. The stories are enacted in life, which is why, aside from the inherent drama of hookups and breakups, sex has featured so prominently in celebrity narratives. (So has violence.) There is an almost voyeuristic frisson in knowing that this isn't simulated as it is in the movies. Nor does celebrity have to labor at creating identification; celebrity protagonists are almost, by definition, culturally preselected on the basis that we identify with them (Everyman) or enjoy a vicarious attachment through them (Superman). And because there are real consequences to the events in the narratives—people actually divorce or fall off the wagon or die—something is always at stake. We don't have to suspend our disbelief.
Finally, celebrity possesses suspense that older forms can only manufacture. That's because traditional forms have closure—an ending when you turn the last page or when the lights go up or when the credits roll. But celebrity narratives have no final chapter. We don't know whether Brad and Angelina will stay together or have more children or cheat on one another or decide to join a monastery. We don't know what new revelations will arise about Tiger Woods. We don't even know the truth about Michael Jackson's death yet. We are always awaiting the next installment: the next romance, drug binge, arrest, incarceration, mental breakdown, pregnancy, accident—you name it.
And all this provides yet another, extra-aesthetic satisfaction that conventional entertainments can seldom supply. Long before celebrity reached its apotheosis, the great gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, who purveyed the malfeasance and transgressions of the rich, the famous, and the powerful to tens of millions of Americans, understood that celebrity was a basis for an ongoing, daily national conversation that also served as therapy to a wounded country, albeit with a savage subtext of revenge. Reaching his own peak in the Depression '30s at a time of anxiety and fractiousness, Winchell managed to unify his readers and listeners around his narratives, not only distracting them from calamity but also giving them a rallying point of common reference that was every bit as powerful as the national symbolism that FDR promoted. Winchell turned us into a nation of yentas.
This function is especially potent today in another time of uncertainty and division, when Americans are not only disunited over politics and values, but also share fewer and fewer common experiences. In the past, television, movies, music, even books were sources of national cohesion. Dramatically lower ratings for broadcast television, reduced film attendance, and plummeting CD sales have all loosened the national bonds. We have become a nation of niches. Celebrity is one of the few things that still crosses all lines. As disparate and stratified as Americans are, practically all of them seem to share an intense engagement, or at the very least an acquaintance, with the sagas of Jon and Kate or Brad and Angelina or Jennifer and whomever, which is oddly comforting. These are America's modern denominators, and in some ways Jon and Kate are our Fred and Ginger—not, obviously, talentwise, but in the way they provide escape and give us something we can all talk about.
Still, it denigrates our favorite movies, television shows, novels, and plays to think of them as merely providing us with mindless escapism or subjects for conversation. Like all good art, the best of them resonate with us because they provide us with life lessons or because they capture the cultural moment or because they give us a glimpse of transcendence or because they stimulate the imagination. The best of celebrity has that capacity too, and just as the most complex films, novels, and plays have layers of meaning and even profound truths, so do the best and longest-lasting celebrity narratives, like Jackson's or Marilyn Monroe's or the Kennedy family's. These themes can convert a celebrity narrative from fact to metaphor, from entertainment to art, from gossip to an epic novel.
Reading People or Us or Perez Hilton, we learn variously about the joys of new love and the hurts of the old, the satisfactions of parenthood, the wages of sin, the punishment for hubris, the drawbacks to fame as well as its blessings, the risk of losing yourself and the exhilaration of finding yourself, and, perhaps above all, the things that really matter in life and the things that don't, which means that celebrity, far from being a shallow artifice, often addresses the fundamental differences between the real and the false, the meaningful and the meaningless. These are the concerns to which we have always turned to art to explain. Even the Speidi story has a postmodernist subtext about identity, reinvention, the lust for fame, and envy that tells us something significant about ourselves and our society if we have the tenacity to dissect it.
In effect, then, we have invented celebrity and latched onto it because celebrity does a better job of giving us what traditional art and entertainments once gave us before they became too enervated to surprise us or we became too jaded to be surprised. By the same token, in a symbiotic turn, many protagonists of celebrity narratives have become sophisticated enough to realize that they could recast their narratives as a way of sustaining their own celebrity, turning their life into their work. One will never know how much of Michael Jackson's eccentricity was a way to keep his narrative (and his celebrity) going, though we can be fairly certain that his decision to return to performing was intended as another chapter in his story: Michael's Comeback! We don't know how much of Lindsay Lohan's behavior is a way to keep herself in the public eye when she has no movies to do so. And we don't know how much Madonna's abrupt career changes and public romances are her way of manipulating celebrity to her benefit. We do know the effect.
On the other hand, even people who seem to resist creating narratives that might attract tabloid attention, a grande dame like Meryl Streep or a Hollywood nice guy like Tom Hanks, are sucked into the celebrity narrative vortex not because their lives are especially salacious or sensational but because their enormous talent and their success are themselves stories about which people want to hear or read. The Los Angeles Times recently ran a front-page article on Streep for no other reason than that she is America's most celebrated actress—a small narrative fillip. The story of developing talent and succeeding with it is a standard celebrity tale—though, as Tiger Woods discovered, the bland success story can rapidly transmogrify into an entirely different sort of narrative when more prurient elements present themselves. In any case, celebrity casts a wide net—not just pathology but also "feel-good." To which one could add this irony: J. D. Salinger is a celebrity largely by creating a narrative in which he abjures not only celebrity but also society.
The upshot is that celebrity narratives today are so effective, so ubiquitous, and so vigorous that they overwhelm virtually every other entertainment and art form, even the ones in which entertainers originally made their names. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, to use just one example, are far better known for their life together than for the films they make, and there is no doubt that more people read about them or watch their exploits on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood than attend their films. One might even say that their lives are such a big entertainment that their films are now a product of their celebrity rather than a source for it, to the point where their celebrity narratives can actually obscure their work, making it harder for an audience to accept them as the characters they play.
Yet it is not only that celebrity has triumphed over more traditional forms; it has, like cultural kudzu, subordinated the media generally. Since celebrity is a narrative in the medium of life, it requires magazines, newspapers, television shows, and perhaps most especially the Internet to promote it—a service these media happily perform and from which they get great residual benefits. As a result, the media are filled with celebrity narratives, constantly hawking them so that celebrity is to America today what the movies and television were to earlier generations, only more so. It is almost as if celebrity hangs ever-present in the ether where no previous entertainment has ever existed. We practically breathe it.
And so today we are gripped by Tiger Woods's story, and when his disappears, as it eventually will, another narrative will arrive and then another and then another, ad infinitum. That is how celebrity works—as a kind of endless daisy chain that amuses us, unifies us, and even occasionally educates us".
© 2009
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