Approaching celebrity studies

Abstract

The analysis of celebrity, celebrities and celebrity culture is one of the growth industries for the humanities and social sciences over the last decade. Psychologists warn us of the dangers of ‘celebrity worship’, sociologists interrogate young people about their personal expectations of fame, and even a discipline with as attenuated a relation to popular culture as literary studies now studies such things as ‘post-colonial celebrity’. The textual richness of celebrity culture is proving irresistible, and so the fetish for textual analysis that dominated so much of the 1980s has found itself right at home in the study of celebrity. But is this what we want from the study of celebrity? What are the approaches that are most needed, and which are likely to be the most productive for those of us in cultural and media studies for whom celebrity has become part of the heartland for the study of popular culture? This article will discuss some of the options, and in particular it will ask how we might establish a stronger base for the study of the industrial production, as well as the audience consumption, of celebrity.

Keywords:

• celebrity studies
• celebrity culture
• media consumption
• media production

Notes

1. A study conducted by the UK research organisation YouGov in 2005 surveyed 800 young people in the 16–19-year age group (Cassidy 2006). They found that one in 10 of the teenagers would abandon their education if they had the chance to appear on television and that 16% of the teenagers surveyed believed that they would eventually find success through celebrity. Nine per cent believed that becoming famous was a great way to become wealthy without bothering about acquiring skills or qualifications and an additional 11% said that they were ‘waiting to be discovered’.

2. P. David Marshall's Celebrity culture reader (2007) provides examples of this range of approaches.

3. Here, I mean a culture of consumption based around media representations of particular individuals and the related modes of constructing identities.

4. There have been a few studies (McDonald and Andrews 2001, for example) which look at the political economy of televised sport, sporting celebrities and the development of transnational brands, but even so the examination of the relation between sport, television and transnational celebrity advertising is probably one of the more neglected areas of media studies in recent years. Everyone seems to agree it is important, but it has still not developed as a focus of major research projects.

There is work out there which is beginning to find ways of asking these questions. Couldry et al.’s (2008) large empirical study of media consumption and social engagement included a related study of a group they described as their ‘celebrity cluster’. An article from this study examined the particular modes of engagement with public and political issues this group exhibited, and found that it ran against the grain of much of the theorising of the political potential of the broadening of access that celebrity culture is often assumed to represent (Couldry and Markham 2007).