Celebrity culture

Interesting article about the obscenity of celebrity culture below. One can only imagine that it's rise is directly proportional to the increasing availability of technology that provides us with instant information...Gen Y in particular has taken to this and doesn't realise how amazing it is that Britney Spears can abandon her underwear, shave her head or attack a car with an umbrella - and the whole Western world knows about it within 5 hours.

Drowning in a tawdry sea

April 28, 2007 07:26am

WHETHER we regard them as constituting a sea or a cesspit, we're drowning in them. Celebrities. In their shallow lives and shabby deaths

Our media and our minds are filled with celebrity affairs, celebrity marriages, celebrity honeymoons in celebrity resorts, followed by celebrity adoptions (the approved method of celebrity parenthood, in that they can cast the child as they would a kid for a movie - as opposed to taking the pot luck of conventional pregnancy) followed by revelations of trips to celebrity rehabs and celebrity divorce in celebrated brawls conducted by celebrity lawyers.

We have celebrity defendants in murder trials and celebrity candidates for elections, and can watch minor celebs on celebrity quiz or "reality" shows. And if the mainstream media is momentarily distracted from their meretricious doings by war or climate change, there are always specialist celeb mags and cable channels.

If there's one thing the fans love even more than a celebrated and worthless life it's an appropriately tawdry ending, preferably by overdose. Though I'd managed to be blissfully ignorant of Anna Nicole Smith's existence, it became compulsory after it ended. As are the lives and lofty examples of our thuggish sports stars (now, there's another devalued word) and the antics of the Barbie Doll army. Not to forget those other role models - the drug-addled models who totter like derelicts up and down the catwalks.

Semi-talented rock stars, boof-headed rugby players who treat women like dirt and gross businessmen whose claim to fame rests on obscene salaries join the conga line of those notorious for their notoriety.

What's going on here? Are our lives so meaningless, so lacking in imagination or energy that we have to waste our time, money and neurons on this human trash? It's a serious social illness -- if for no other reason than these useless idiots distract us from the achievements of people who really are worthy of our attention.

All this came to mind when I was helping launch the Caroline Chisholm Education Foundation in Melbourne, a marvellous venture to help kids over the hurdles. Chisholm was a secular saint, one of those indomitable women who profoundly changed the world around them, whether that world was Madras or Melbourne, Sydney or the bush. In her day she was cherished as a hero, a reputation gained through her work, not through a personal publicist. Now we see her face on our money - but not one in a hundred knows a damn thing about her.

Yet who isn't cursed with the knowledge of Paris Hilton? This trashiest of all celebs makes the trailer trash on Jerry Springer look like European aristocracy. Eliminating junk email isn't the problem. How do we screen out all further reference to this megabrat?

Real fame, enduring fame, relates to achievement - whereas celebrity relates to ratings, cover stories and social pages. I'm not saying they don't blur and overlap, that mass marketing cannot commidify authentic, genuine fame and make it into nonsense - symbolised in the
T-shirts of Einstein poking out his tongue at the celebrity he'd never wanted or sought. The full-time celeb wants and seeks nothing else.

Fame is often an unintended consequence of work in a lab, a jungle, a hospital, at the coalface of suffering. Whereas celebrity is pursued for its own sake, pulled along by a dog-team of showbiz hacks. At fever pitch for decades, the psychopathology of celebrity now seems a terminal disease - eclipsing the work of the unsung heroes who cure terminal diseases.

The opposite of fame isn't obscurity so much as infamy. (Somehow "fame" seems inappropriate to a Hitler.) In a sense anonymity is the antonym of celebrity but, on another level, celebrity is its own opposite. The word evokes triviality, inconsequence, worthlessness. The only good thing? Celebrity has the shelf-life of yoghurt. Celebrities are tissues (you choose between facial and toilet) compared to the chiselled marble of enduring reputation. Though as a trip to Westminster Abbey reminds us, even marble has its use-by date.

We live in an era when more US citizens vote for contestants on TV's American Idol than for their presidency (and then elect and re-elect a dolt like Dubyah), in a time when Paris Hilton defames both a hotel chain and a city, when Madonna can happily infringe the Vatican's copyright, and the Dalai Lama depends on the endorsement of Richard Gere. You wonder whether the weather is, after all, the greatest of human crises. Isn't the gush and tosh of celebrity culture (sic) every bit as threatening?

With climate change, we might all be drowned by rising sea levels. But wouldn't you rather drown in seawater than in the rising tide of celebrity bullshit?

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