Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
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discovered an opening to a descending stairway leading to an underground tomb. They eventually got to a door with Tutankhamun’s name on it and broke through it. There they were stunned to find a nearly perfectly intact tomb, which included almost 5,400 objects the pharaoh might need in the next life, from perfumes and oils to sandals and linen underwear to his solid gold coffin.42
The discovery of an untouched 3,000-year-old-tomb was an international sensation that sparked further fascination with ancient Egypt; it took Carter ten years to catalog all the treasures, which eventually went to the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. It also inspired what came to be called a wave of “Tut-mania,” with newspapers vying for stories and scoops about Tut, the tomb, and, especially, the alleged “Pharaoh’s Curse,” meaning death for anyone who invaded or disturbed a pharaoh’s tomb.43 Egyptian motifs became popular on clothes, jewelry, and in Art Deco architecture; a fruit company featured King Tut brand lemons; President Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut. Carter and Carnarvon (along with Tut) became instant celebrities; the American magician Charles Carter rebranded himself as Carter the Great. A 1923 record, “Old King Tut,” became a hit.44
Fifty years later, in 1976, the blockbuster museum exhibit The Treasures of Tutankhamun became an American obsession, touring the country for three years; it was the most popular museum show in U.S. history.45 As the Associated Press reported, “People waited in lines for nine hours to see it during its first stop two years ago in Washington. In Chicago, crowds gathered at 10 the night before the show opened.” The Los Angeles Times called the phenomenon a “King Tut binge” and said museum attendees were like “a human tidal wave.”46 The New York Times estimated that at least 400 manufacturers were producing Tut-inspired products, including whiskey bottles in the shape of Tut’s death mask.47 By April 1978, the comedian Steve Martin appeared on Saturday Night Live in a pharaoh’s costume singing his instantly hilarious and famous song “King Tut,” which contained the lyrics “Now when he was a young man / He never thought he’d see / People stand in line to see the boy king” and “Now, if I’d known / They’d line up just to see you / I’d trade in all my money / And bought me a museum.” He ended with “He gave his life for tourism.”
Why this fascination with a pharaoh from over 3,000 years ago? Why did he become an unwitting celebrity? Because so many tombs of the pharaohs had been looted, to find one so complete and untouched was unique and thrilling. And, in part, it was all of the surviving possessions, the gold, the jewels, the statues, as opposed to any singular accomplishments in his life, which made him a twentieth-century star. But the tomb was also a window into what was believed to be the first great civilization, and it was the use of mummification and the myth of the pharaoh’s curse that tied Tut and ancient Egypt to the supernatural, the occult. His tomb, with all of the clothing, food, and the like that were to accompany him into a fervently believed in afterlife, tap into our fascination with and fears about death and fantasies of immortality. All this physical evidence of a faith in an afterlife, and then everyday people seeing someone who died 3,000 years before but is now newly known, did mean Tut now mattered to posterity, was not fully gone at all. As humans grapple with the meaning of life, with the “why are we here” question, seeing evidence of those who came before us, what they made, how they lived and what they believed connects us to a sense of origins. Tut and ancient Egypt were, to twentieth-century Brits and Americans, exotic, different. Yet he was an emblem of the persistence of human striving, and of the faith in eternal life.
Do our lives matter? Does what we do matter after we’re gone? By the twentieth century, the rise of secularization and a waning belief, for some, in an afterlife, “bred a twin obsession with posterity and death.”48 Celebrity—to be known by millions, to be mourned when you go, to live on in the hearts and minds of people—tied the new mechanisms and technologies of fame production with that age-old longing for everlasting life.
Celebrity and Aura
If remote, unknowable, but famous royalty had an aura about them that stemmed in fact from their being so rare, so distinctive, so elevated from everyday people, what has omnipresent, intensified visibility done to the aura of the famous? In the mid-1930s, the social critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay entitled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he argued that technological innovation, especially with the rise of “mass culture,” led to a shift in the nature and value of art, and his argument applies to how mass-produced visuality may have affected the shift from fame to celebrity. Early art, he argued, was one of a kind, embedded in specific locations and rituals, and because a painting or sculpting was not identically reproducible, it had an aura. Think, for example, of the aura surrounding the Mona Lisa. Part of the aura, embedded in it, was knowledge of the artwork’s particular historical uses and its ownership over time. This aura imbues the work with authenticity; the one-of-a-kind painting, for example, was distinguished by its uniqueness and its remoteness from daily life. Benjamin contended that the aura of the art object has been destroyed by widespread reproduction—we can all get prints of the Mona Lisa if we want—in that the process of duplicating an artwork effaces the uniqueness of the object and its distance from the viewer.
In a museum, for instance, works are presented as individual, distinctive, and therefore special; they are secured within the halls of the institution, sometimes even behind glass, and we can’t own or even touch them. Elevated as singular works of inaccessible beauty that we are meant to admire, even worship, they retain their aura. Benjamin argues that new technologies, including lithography and print, but especially photography, allow artworks to be widely copied and distributed, thus shattering the aura, challenging the notion of the one-of-a-kind and authentic work, and shifting focus away from the object’s symbolic value by reinstituting the work back into everyday life, where it can be acquired and used by anyone and thus brought closer to the masses. The process of reproduction, then, results in the democratization of art, an effect that Benjamin sees as politically useful, even progressive. Thus, as media scholar Paddy Scannell notes, “New forms of mass communication may transform consumers into active participants and therein lays a new relationship between producers, products, and audiences. Not the worship of the author (as genius) or of the work (as truth and beauty) by an adoring audience, but a more equal and collaborative relationship in which the author aligns himself with the audience (the masses), takes their point of view, and gives it expression in his work.”49
In the decades that accompanied and followed the Industrial Revolution, rapidly changing technologies meant that artistic modes of self-representation were quickly expanding. Advances in printing, etching, and, later, photography allowed anyone with a relatively small amount of money to record and distribute a likeness. As a result, a greater number of people could become recognizable, their images and stories disbursed, which meant that it was no longer only the wealthy and powerful who could hope for attention or renown. At the same time, photographic reproductions allowed the public access to the images of the elite and influential, thus erasing the feeling of distance between the famous “them” and the rest of us. So while Benjamin argued that technological advancements allowed for the democratization of art, these developments also shaped the nature of fame. As self-representation became less dependent on large and expensive artistic processes like sculpture and oil painting, the aura of the famous figure—his or her uniqueness as a public person at a distance or remove from the rest of society—was thereby diminished. Fame, and the famous, appeared more accessible. Meanwhile, newspapers and photography gave the public a greater sense of access to, and influence over, well-known figures. It is this evolution that we trace in the pages ahead.
Overview of the Book
Celebrity thus provides an overview account of the history of stardom, its dynamic relationship with technologies of mass communication, and the academic theories that have emerged to help explain the production, circulation, and effects of celebrity culture. We offer a brief history of fame, and the historical modes of celebrity production, and how they have changed (and persisted) over time. We cannot possibly discuss everyone who became a celebrity since the nineteenth century, so we have sought to focus on certain exemplars of different types of fame and stardom. A central aspect of the history of fame is, in Braudy’s words, the “changing ways by which individuals have sought to bring themselves to the attention of others and, not incidentally, have thereby gained power over them.” From the beginning, “fame has required