Transcript Celebrity and fame: a process analysis, FT Amy Winehouse and the

I am curious about…
• The nature of celebrity and its ontology
• Amy Winehouse, celebrity and the forces that
created and destroyed her
• The Queen as a performer of fame
Through Whitehead’s process philosophy
Three key ideas:
• Nothing exists for itself and of itself, but it has uniqueness only as it is
positioned in a novel way in relation to the other, as subject to subject
• There is a process of becoming out of potentiality that implies the coming
into being of a unique set of entities in subjective relationship that creates
a distinctive experience and formation (concrescence).
• The world is encountered through ‘prehension’, which means the
givenness of something, together with an ability as humans to be
consciously aware of and grasp events in the physical world causally.
Knownness
I take ‘knownness’ to means varying levels of
tacit public knowledge about and appreciation
of a performer, usually gained through a body of
work and accomplishments, and a set of
affirming
interactions,
networks
and
relationships accumulated over time. This is the
core of enduring fame.
Celebrity
I take celebrity to mean a particularly striking prominence
and recognisability of a person in the various media
forms, including Twitter and other social media. It is
especially palpable and concrete, imbued with an
individual’s personas, and linked to public reception and
resonance in consumers’ visual mindstreams through
facial, name and brand recognition.
Celebrity is a collocation of embodied phenomena with a
disembodied set of mediatised images which become
distributed and commoditized in global media outlets.
Thus, at least partially, celebrity is manufactured and
constructed in response to public taste and target
markets.
Its semantics also revolve around the
associations of the word itself with particular public
figures and it designation to certain types of people.
Fame
Fame I take to mean a
of being eminent or having
renown forged in a society’s collective consciousness, by
which I mean a society’s given notions of accomplishment
that are shared by individuals and groups within that
society. It is a conceptual category that centres on
enduring notions of public success or an attribution of
particular valuableness that emerges from what a society
deems as significant or leads to affluence. One can speak
of a person having fame as a state of being sustained in a
particular cultural matrix; but one can also postulate
fame as a meta-cultural frame of valuing within a society.
Thus, the notion of fame forms the socio-cultural ground
in which celebrity is actuated.
• Performance ability vs product construction
• Codification of performance expectations or
performing celebrity
• Reception as desire: to-be-like, to-be-with
• Existential connection, taste and identity
• Power and marketability of the image
The term ‘visibility’ can be conceived as one
indicator of the the degree of celebrity. This term is
taken to mean both the overt representations in
media forms and the reception of such
representations by consumers, leading to how
heightened the celebrity is in a consumer's
consciousness or a distinct conjuration associated
with a celebrity. It is this distinct coming-together
or gestalt of representation and reception that
creates visibility.
Back to Black
became the UK's
best selling album
of the 21st century
Winehouse's final
recording was a
duet entitled "Body
and Soul" with Tony
Bennet
Died of alcohol
poisoning at 27
Winehouse’s celebrity as a novel and idiosyncratic phenomenon containing a
collocation or a concrescence of
• her distinctive style, presentation and voice, compared to Sarah Vaughan
(her embodiments)
• connected soulful music that was inter-generational (her stylistic features)
• the archetypal story of the insignificant lower middle class Jewish girl
made good (grand narrative of success and fall from grace)
• Juxtaposition of her sixties fashion sense with a punk sensibility
(postmodern aesthetic perpetuated by the paparazzi)
• celebrity as a caustic phenomenon for her that shaped her subjectivity
(she did not perform celebrity well or a resistance to construction as
celebrity)
• Notoriety related to alcohol and drug consumption, and her ‘extreme’
performances. (Faux Pas in tension with Nostalgia)
• Strong cross-generational reception—echoes of the past and embodiment
in the present (potentiality as a historicity)
Coke's celebrity endorsement
August 10, 2011 - 11:16AM
Comments 11
A gang of drug traffickers is inserting pictures
of late British singer Amy Winehouse in their
bags of cocaine to improve sales, Brazilian
police said on Tuesday.
The clear plastic bags carry a paper insert with
a picture of the addicted 27-year-old singer,
who died at her north London home on July
23. She is described in the insert as "Amy
House".
Bags of cocaine with Winehouse's picture were
being sold at between 10 and 25 reals (about
$6 to $15), said Lieutenant Colonel Glaucio
Moreira, who led a police raid in the shanty
town of Manginhos that made the find.
 58 Years as
Monarch
 Revered still,
and by a
younger
generation
The Queen’s celebrity and fame as a novel and idiosyncratic
phenomenon containing a collocation or a concrescence of
• Tradition (her historicity) and endurance (her personal stability and
longevity)
• The performative of royalty (The Queen puts on royalty and
becomes royalty as an embodied state that provokes a contrived
reverential response)
• The sacred places of royalty (palaces of the geographical and
palaces of the imagination)
• Royalty as framed commodity (framed as royal and so protected as
royal, carefully constructed as royal)
• The mythology of beneficence (the Queen brings good or embodies
good and charitability)
• Her authority de jure (her being as Queen is at the core of the legal
system)