(3089/898) Celebrities and other psychopathologies

1538) The process by which attitudes [about Victorians] have modulated from hostility to amused contempt to irony to affectionate humor and finally to an openly acknowledged nostalgia is part of the psychopathology of the later twentieth century, and when the historians of the future want to understand us, they will do well to examine our outlook upon the past.

Richard Jenkyns
"Victoria's Secret"
New York Review of Books (11/30/1995)
[review of When Passion Reigned: Sex
and the Victorians by Patricia Anderson and
The Naked Heart by Peter Gay]

1539) Andy Warhol was absolutely wrong. Yeah, sure, in the future everyone will qualify for his or her fifteen minutes of fame. What Warhol either failed to perceive or neglected to tell us was that, once the fifteen minutes was over, the supposedly disposable celebrity would refuse to go away. Like houseguests from hell, they linger, proving as indestructible as old plastic catbox liners. [...]

Celebrities do not go quietly into that dark night. On the outer fringe, a few may fade and die [...] Nearer the central core, however, a condition of stasis has been achieved - a symbiotic clusterfuck among three fixed points: the celeb's addiction to attention and the multimedia's insatiable hunger for copy with which to feed a public prurience - as bottomless as it is shameless - conspiring to create a scary pantheon of the famous.

Logic dictates that if a new media star is born every twenty-eight and a half seconds, and only the most peripheral will go away, we will soon experience celebrity overload. [...] [T]he planet in general, and this city [Los Angeles] in particular, is entirely over-populated by celebrities. ...

[The pantheon of celebrities] is not ... a pantheon of gods, but [...] a neo-aristocracy, created not by accident of birth and inherited wealth and title, but by accident of random media exposure. The question [...] is exactly how large an aristocracy can a society - even a global society - support. When we have so many celebs and wannabe celebs that it becomes difficult to identify them all without a tipsheet, a certain saturation point must have been reached.

Of the trio of conspirators - the public, the media, and the celebrities - the public can't be blamed. The public is never blamed for anything. In a democracy, the will of the people rules, even when it is stupid, hysterical and ignorant. It's currently trendy to blame the media, but individual media representatives invariably recite the standard defense: They're only giving the people what they want. [...]

At this point, two collective sets of hostile eyes turn in the direction of the celebrities. If you have to blame someone, who better than a bunch of naked emperors and empresses? The accusatory questions come thick and fast. Who are these people, anyway? Why are they able to command so much of our time and attention? Why do they exist at all? [...]

As hundreds of aspirants grab for a handhold, the celebrity bandwagon groans audibly under the weight. Passage is no longer limited to TV and movie stars, rock musicians and model hawking a product or project. Evangelists are in, as are high-profile lawyers, property developers, popcorn manufacturers, politician's mistresses, and dangerous criminals. [...] Richard Ramirez has a fan club. People magazine profiles Jack Kevorkian. David Koresh achieves martyrdom, and the judicial system founders under the highly promoted adoration of scum like Erik and Lyle Menendez.

Mick Farren
"Celebrity Overload" in
Los Angeles Reader (12/8/1995)
drawing on the research of Leo Brady in
The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History (1986)

1540) The Simpson trial was not only about race in this country, but also about the unhealthy relationship we seem to have with our designated celebrities. For a moment, by some insanely twisted egalitarianism, Rosa Lopez had become as significant in the world of gossip as Jack Nicholson, Hillary Clinton or the Princess of Wales.

Mick Farren
"Celebrity Overload" in
Los Angeles Reader (12/8/1995)