The concept of an ‘anticelebrity’: a new type of antihero of the media age and its impact on modern politics

ABSTRACT

Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Barack Obama. How have ‘traditional’ politicians like ‘Mutti Merkel’, who embody the opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as ‘mediatisation’, ‘personalisation’, and ‘celebritisation’ explains the emergence of charismatic media personalities, but fails to explicate the success of ‘conventional’ politicians within systems of mediatised politics structured according to a celebrity logic. Based on an analysis of newspapers and both historical and contemporary political actors, this article argues that celebrity politics produced an antithesis, the ‘anticelebrity’. This political figure constitutes an ‘authentic’ alternative to the supposed mediatised ‘superficiality’ of celebrity politicians, but could not have the same appeal without the latter superficiality to contrast itself with. The text constructs an ideal type of the anticelebrity figure within different political and media systems, distinguishing between ‘reactionary anticelebrities’ and ‘natural anticelebrities’. By focussing on the anticelebrity concept, the article shows the photographic negative of the celebrity politician, which also enables us to see the contours of the notoriously blurred phenomenon of celebrity more distinctly.

KEYWORDS:

• anticelebrity
• celebrity politics
• celebritisation
• celebrity culture
• mediatisation
• antihero

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Martin Kohlrausch and Isabel Casteels, as well as the editor, and anonymous reviewers, for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Betto van Waarden

Betto van Waarden holds a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at Lund University, and is conducting research for his new project ‘Presenting Parliament: Parliamentarians’ visions of the communication and role of parliament within the mediated democracies of Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1844-1995ʹ. Previously, he received postdoctoral fellowships from the KU Leuven and the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, where he explored new digital methods for analysing large corpora of press and parliamentary data. Van Waarden obtained his PhD also at the KU Leuven, after successfully defending his dissertation on ‘Public Politics: The coming of age of the media politician in a transnational communicative space, 1880s-1910s’. He holds an MPhil in political thought and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in liberal arts and sciences from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, USA. Van Waarden has a background in politics and media himself, having worked for the European Commission in Brussels, the World Affairs Council, the United Nations Information Center, and Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and the news magazine De Groene Amsterdammer in Amsterdam. Based on his scholarship and experiences, he has written on media and politics in numerous academic journals, as well as in Le Monde Diplomatique, De Volkskrant, Het Financieele Dagblad, and De Morgen.