Art Celebrity: Van Gogh's vision, Picasso's calculation...

The Celebrity in Art

In discussing Andy Warhol and the origins of art celebrity on Monday, we looked at art stars such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso and Pollock, exploring their individual contributions to art history and  how we remember them. Artists' works often serve as a lens through which we view the culture of their respective times. Michelangelo takes the forms of Greek sculpture and applies them to the human figure in painting, creating a colorful set of hulking figures to depict epic religious tales at the height of the Renaissance. Da Vinci becomes the embodiment of the tendency to merge visual arts and science, despite the fact that he existed in a large movement of Renaissance individuals who do just the same. Picasso and Pollock alike represent the largely male intellectual movement toward abstract expressionism, the exploration of perception as fluid and malleable.

Van Gogh's Perception

As we discussed in class, artists aligned with the abstract expressionist movement chose to view life through an alternate lens, distorting aspects of reality and challenging the meaning of the concept with respect to painting and other media. Picasso challenged such constructs through calculated alterations often seen in his cubist portraiture. Van Gogh depicted objects and scenes in life with a similar distortion, but one so consistent that it seemed almost natural to him. The contrast between Picasso's Rose Period paintings and his Cubist paintings, for example, show a clear and intentional shift in modes of representation. Like Van Gogh, contemporary artist Jessica Park displays a consistent representation of reality distant from the average still life. In describing a painting of Baxter Hall, Park points to four anomalies in the image, hollow pink discs with yellow rods through their centers: "the tiny light pillars come from the pupil of each eye." Although she explains it so simply in text, our discussion suggests that the light pillars do not come from each the pupil of each and every eye, but from hers in particular--Park, a high functioning autistic painter, has a view of the world that contrasts that of the general. Her depiction of the Potala Palace in Lhasa turns the austere, modestly colored exterior of the structure into just one shining neon piece of a cartoon landscape complete with four separate rainbows. Van Gogh's famous Starry Night shows the shapes of the buildings outside his French commune flowing into one another, a common theme in his works. Perhaps things always did swirl and flow into one another through Picasso's eyes. Impossible as it is to tell, perhaps this opaqueness of difference is an essential part of art celebrity.

What is Celebrity, Who is a Celebrity?

What is Celebrity?

The signs of celebrity are all around us, but they are not easy to characterize or analyze, perhaps because of their very ubiquity. To the contrary, the meaning of ‘celebrity’, like celebrities themselves – those on whom the informal title is conferred – seems to disappear in one’s hand. It is a status conferred by no one and by everyone. If we think of celebrity as a status, a number of questions arise: What exactly is a “status”? Who confers a status and for what reasons? How long does it last? What are the conditions of its conferral and of its removal? The truth is that no one knows how long fame will last, once conferred, or what the requirements for keeping it might be, though there is an army of PR functionaries whose job it is to figure this question out.

We are of different minds when it comes to fame. On the one hand, we would like to believe that fame belongs to the gifted, to those who are not like us. We would like to believe, just as the Greeks believed, that there are some among us who are different. If that is the case, then the origins of fame are unknowable. It belongs to God or the gods or nature or the supernatural. On the other hand, there is another, currently more fashionable belief that anyone potentially could be famous, that it is a matter of our talent being discovered, that celebrity is a matter of luck. These are not mutually exclusive options, of course. The celebrity could be both special and undiscovered, like Norma Jean before she became Marilyn Monroe. A third option is that celebrity is entirely a fiction, that any one of us could be a celebrity if only he or she had the right agent, if only we had the machinery of stardom behind us.

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One thing you will notice as we go along is that one of the tendencies in studying celebrity is to refer to specific celebrities. It is hard not to speak in examples. It’s one of those areas in which abstraction tends to slip into concreteness, not the other way around.

The danger in studying celebrity is that the brightness of the star will blind us to where that light is coming from. In this sense, the first obstacle to understanding the meaning of “stars” is the word itself, for those whom we label stars would perhaps be more accurately referred to as “moons” because the light that we see when we look at them emanates from elsewhere and simply reflects off of them. Wouldn’t this be the way that Durkheim views celebrity?

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Do charisma and celebrity designate the same thing? Charisma is a word that, at least in its present form, refers to a quality which some individuals possess. Celebrity is a more elastic term that refers to the quality of the individual as well as to the individual him or herself. It can be used in the plural, to designate a class of people, and can be turned into a communal event (“celebration”) or the verb, “celebrate”, which conveys the sense of a collective recognition of the specialness of an event or person.

During the course of the semester, it will be useful to be aware of such lexical differences to see what they might tell us about the meaning of terms that we sometimes use interchangeably.

Who is a celebrity?

How do we determine who is a celebrity? There is no formal register, the way back at the end of the 19^th century there was a “social register” demarcating who was and who was not a member of the East Coast social elite. There is no such formal celebrity register, but are there other, less formal indices?

As a thought experiment, lets consider various candidates to see if the status of celebrity applies. How about Lady Gaga? Clearly, she is a celebrity, but how do we know that? What about President Obama? What about Osama bin Laden?

What is the difference between fame, celebrity, and renown? It would be worthwhile to distinguish between these words, if only to make sure that we are always talking about the same thing. Maybe the most straightforward sets of words to distinguish are hero and heroism and celebrity and, well, celebrity. A hero does something and is famous for doing that something. That thing that the hero does is also something that society values. The actions of the hero go beyond mere prowess.

Athletes, for example, can have prowess, but a hero is someone who marshals his or her prowess towards a goal that society deems worthy. And even then that action might not be enough. In the case of the athlete, how many receive the designation of being a “hero”? This was probably the case with Greek athletes who won laurels in the first Olympic games, but that was because the games represented more than athletic competition. They were rituals in honor of the gods. Among modern day athletes, whom would you refer to as “heroes”? When I think back to my own childhood, I can think of some athletes who would fall within the category of “hero.” People of my parents’ generation might say that Ted Williams or Babe Ruth was a hero, and probably they were, but is there any athlete today who is comparable? Jackie Robinson was also before my time, but certainly he would be considered a hero, but that was more because he overcame racial discrimination, so that much of what he is admired for is performing well both on the field and off and not being defeated by racism. I looked up to a few professional football players and baseball players when I was a kid, but I’m not sure that the athletes I looked up to would be categorized as heroes, and if they were, it was mostly in the eyes of young boys like myself. Maybe young boys and girls still view athletes as heroes, but my sense is that this is less common, that athletes are admired, envied, celebrated, and debated. But who among them would we call a hero – unless they had done something else, something “worthwhile” outside the arena, that makes them admirable “as human beings”?

How about Special Olympians? I think that some of us would call them “heroes,” and that might be sentimentality speaking. It also reflects the fact that we admire those who overcome limitations (like Jackie Robinson) and who work hard to achieve a goal. We identify with such people and we admire them, not for their “gifts” but for their work ethic and for “making society a better place”.

Who else is a hero? The classic model of the hero is the warrior, but interestingly, in this day and age, warriors are often anonymous. Consider the case of the Navy Seals who killed Osama bin Laden. What are their names? We don’t know. Can they be heroes if we don’t even know their names? In the days of the Greek warriors, heroism was all about renown, in other words, about being known. One defied death in battle in order to be known and in order for your name to live on, alongside the names of your ancestors. Now that our warriors are anonymous, who are our heroes?

Isn’t it still the case that the hero must be known, that an important component of being a hero is being recognized as such?

Are celebrities heroes? Maybe. Charles Lindbergh was both a celebrity and a hero, and I’m sure that there are a few cases that we could think of in which both terms apply (Neal Armstrong, Lance Armstrong before his fall from grace), but there is still no doubt that we are talking about two separate (if sometimes overlapping) categories when we speak of celebrities and heroes.

Preliminary Thoughts on Celebrity

I'm posting below the thirteen "Preliminary Thoughts on Celebrity" that I sent you earlier. I would like you to add one or more "preliminary thoughts" of your own in your own post. Be brave! Don't worry if you're right or wrong or whether or not the point you're making applies in all cases. The object here is to come to a better understanding of the phenomenon of celebrity culture, and to that end, you can learn as much from generalizations that miss the mark as from those that hit the mark. Getting an initial assertion out there to look at and consider allows us to evaluate it and, if appropriate, refine the point. So give it a try!

1.  Heroes and saints attain their status by embodying unique qualities and performing extraordinary deeds (even if those qualities and deeds are of an absolutely familiar type). This is not a requirement of celebrity status. Celebrities can become celebrities without being anything or doing anything extraordinary.

2. Someone can become a celebrity without having any inherently extraordinary qualities and without having accomplished anything in his or her life. The central fact of celebrity is that a person’s talent is separate from his or her status as a celebrity.

3. A celebrity is someone who is recognized.

A celebrity is someone who is recognized by a large number of people.

A celebrity is someone who is recognized by a large number of people whom the celebrity does not recognize.

A celebrity is someone who is known for being recognized (or who is recognized for being known).

4. In defining celebrity in terms of “being recognized for being known,” I am borrowing from a ‘famous’ phrase by Daniel Boorstin: “A celebrity is someone who is famous for being famous.”

I have altered Boorstin’s phrase to do two things:

1) To emphasize the importance of recognition as a process;

2) To emphasize the two stages of this process: being recognized and being known for being recognized.

5. Celebrities are people who are stared at. They are stared at not for anything they have done, but because they have been seen elsewhere. Celebrities are people about whom other people say, “I know him from some place.” “I’ve seen him on TV.”

6. However one first becomes recognized, attaining celebrity status is dependent upon being seen at events and in the public spaces where other celebrities are seen.

7. The presence of celebrities ensures that the media will be present at the event.

8. The relationship of the media and the celebrity is a symbiotic and mutually-sustaining one. The media creates the environment within which celebrities are created: no media, no celebrity. The opposite is also true: the media needs celebrities to ensure that they have an audience.

9. While in the past, involvement in a scandal would generally have brought public censure, it is no longer a necessary detriment to the celebrity’s career.

10. There are at least three levels or statuses associated with contemporary celebrity: celebrities, stars, and superstars. Attainment of celebrity transcendence is marked by instant, global recognition in multiple countries and languages, and those who have attained this status can often be identified by a single name: Brad, Madonna, Messi, Hillary...Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, Athena…

11. The vast majority of would-be celebrities end far short of permanent attainment of celebrity status and enshrinement in the celebrity pantheon. Even most of those who actually achieve their proverbial ‘15 minutes of fame’ are then condemned to live in the faint afterglow of their brief moment in the spotlight.  

12. Fame has its opposite – infamy – which imputes a moral value to fame. The structural opposite of celebrity is anonymity, and, in that sense, it has no moral connotation.

13. The Pillars of Celebrity Culture:

1. Public (in all its forms: The Public, Public Places, Publicity, Public Relations)

2. Performance

3. Pleasure

4. Profit

5. Print

6. Pictures

7. Promiscuity