What follows is part of the presentation I gave in Celebrity/Commodity class last week. I was tired of having that other entry up!
It's easy to see the relationship of the public to celebrities as completely commodified: the public "buys" the celebrity image -- whether it is sold by the "veridical person" behind the celebrity image or by the culture industry or by the media doesn't matter. The thing reduces down to an (alienated) exchange of money. Moviegoer pays for ticket. Fan pays for t-shirt. Supermarket customer pays for Us magazine, which paid photographers for pictures of Jennifer Lopez wearing a gown lent her by Versace, which hopes to boost its sales through exposure as the house that dressed Jennifer Lopez for the VMAs, which make money for MTV…and so on. The celebrity image gets constantly bought and sold, and has nothing to do with people as personal, community-imbricated entities.
But as we've been discussing in this class, that's not the whole story of celebrity. Let's take the person buying the Us magazine, for instance. Let's say she's a fan of J-Lo. Let's say when she looks at the picture of her in her Versace gown, smiling at the camera, she feels that she has a kind of connection with J-Lo. Not just the connection of "I own $3.95 worth of J-Lo" – that being the price of Us – but a connection of "I feel personally connected in a human way with Jennifer Lopez." We can say she's a nutty fan. We can say she's operating under a bad-faith assumption: she has no connection with the veridical Jennifer Lopez, realliveJennyfromtheblock, but instead only with the $3.95 or $2,200 or $10,000 J-Lo, the commodified image. But that's only if we assume that there is no relationship with a celebrity possible except a commodified one. What if we use the idea of the gift to posit another one? What if we look at the smile JLo gives the camera as a gift (yes, J-Lo's smile is a gift), which can in fact does have, depending on the position of the perceiver, an inalienable quality? And does that connection require some sort of contact with magic or the sacred? Let's take a better example: the celebrity autograph.
I'm a big fan of Clay Aiken. I watched American Idol season 2 with obsessive voracity – and not only that, I'm a member of the Clay Aiken fan club, I've seen him in concert five times and…I have his autograph. I have it, in fact, framed and hanging on my wall.
Loren Glass talks about Twain's signature as "a mark of his authorial intention" (69) – an authenticating seal or a connection to the pre-writing authentication technique of the verbal promise. Glass links this to the idea of intellectual property – of copyright. The celebrity autograph, I'd argue, functions in a different way. Twain's signature – his autograph – acts as a message that the image within is not to be tampered with or reproduced without permission. It's an attempt to authenticate or to freeze production in place.
But my autograph from Clay Aiken is different. It is, in its way, almost as reproduced as Twain's – Clay signed at least thirty the day I got mine, as we all stepped up to the table in a line. And he's certainly signed thousands, if not millions more since he became a celebrity. And yet, the function of his autograph – or at least, the function for me – is not to assert some kind of authenticity over the photograph I have of him, not to fix its value as a commodity, but instead to turn the photograph into a gift – in fact, to remove it from the realm of commodity. I paid five dollars for the photo, and I paid more for the frame, but those values are completely irrelevant, and in fact, almost irreverent when I consider the autograph as celebrity gift. The autographed picture – and the autograph itself – has become an inalienable possession. As such, it:
1) connects me to its original "owner," the public Clay Aiken whom I met.
2) signifies the way in which I am part of a community or kinship relation with other fans of Clay and of American Idol
3) reminds me of the ritual or sacred dimension of celebrity. We've discussed before the idea of saints' relics as protocelebrity artifacts. Now, my Clay Aiken autograph doesn't function the way, say, the foot of St. Cecila would function. I can't pray to Clay to heal me of disease, nor do I feel that the autograph has blessed my house. But I do feel that in having it, in being given it, I have partaken in the process of magical or mystical transformation that turns ordinary people into celebrities. And in giving me the autograph, Clay also partook in that transformation – should I say translation? Perhaps even transubstantiation? In the moment of gifting, Clay and I engaged in a relationship that both replicated and reinforced the larger give/take of the fan-celebrity dynamic. It's particularly potent, of course, with a celebrity like Clay, who became a celebrity through a reality t.v. show, and thus is even more representative of reciprocal exchange between the celebrity and the audience.
It's easy to see the relationship of the public to celebrities as completely commodified: the public "buys" the celebrity image -- whether it is sold by the "veridical person" behind the celebrity image or by the culture industry or by the media doesn't matter. The thing reduces down to an (alienated) exchange of money. Moviegoer pays for ticket. Fan pays for t-shirt. Supermarket customer pays for Us magazine, which paid photographers for pictures of Jennifer Lopez wearing a gown lent her by Versace, which hopes to boost its sales through exposure as the house that dressed Jennifer Lopez for the VMAs, which make money for MTV…and so on. The celebrity image gets constantly bought and sold, and has nothing to do with people as personal, community-imbricated entities.
But as we've been discussing in this class, that's not the whole story of celebrity. Let's take the person buying the Us magazine, for instance. Let's say she's a fan of J-Lo. Let's say when she looks at the picture of her in her Versace gown, smiling at the camera, she feels that she has a kind of connection with J-Lo. Not just the connection of "I own $3.95 worth of J-Lo" – that being the price of Us – but a connection of "I feel personally connected in a human way with Jennifer Lopez." We can say she's a nutty fan. We can say she's operating under a bad-faith assumption: she has no connection with the veridical Jennifer Lopez, realliveJennyfromtheblock, but instead only with the $3.95 or $2,200 or $10,000 J-Lo, the commodified image. But that's only if we assume that there is no relationship with a celebrity possible except a commodified one. What if we use the idea of the gift to posit another one? What if we look at the smile JLo gives the camera as a gift (yes, J-Lo's smile is a gift), which can in fact does have, depending on the position of the perceiver, an inalienable quality? And does that connection require some sort of contact with magic or the sacred? Let's take a better example: the celebrity autograph.
I'm a big fan of Clay Aiken. I watched American Idol season 2 with obsessive voracity – and not only that, I'm a member of the Clay Aiken fan club, I've seen him in concert five times and…I have his autograph. I have it, in fact, framed and hanging on my wall.
Loren Glass talks about Twain's signature as "a mark of his authorial intention" (69) – an authenticating seal or a connection to the pre-writing authentication technique of the verbal promise. Glass links this to the idea of intellectual property – of copyright. The celebrity autograph, I'd argue, functions in a different way. Twain's signature – his autograph – acts as a message that the image within is not to be tampered with or reproduced without permission. It's an attempt to authenticate or to freeze production in place.
But my autograph from Clay Aiken is different. It is, in its way, almost as reproduced as Twain's – Clay signed at least thirty the day I got mine, as we all stepped up to the table in a line. And he's certainly signed thousands, if not millions more since he became a celebrity. And yet, the function of his autograph – or at least, the function for me – is not to assert some kind of authenticity over the photograph I have of him, not to fix its value as a commodity, but instead to turn the photograph into a gift – in fact, to remove it from the realm of commodity. I paid five dollars for the photo, and I paid more for the frame, but those values are completely irrelevant, and in fact, almost irreverent when I consider the autograph as celebrity gift. The autographed picture – and the autograph itself – has become an inalienable possession. As such, it:
1) connects me to its original "owner," the public Clay Aiken whom I met.
2) signifies the way in which I am part of a community or kinship relation with other fans of Clay and of American Idol
3) reminds me of the ritual or sacred dimension of celebrity. We've discussed before the idea of saints' relics as protocelebrity artifacts. Now, my Clay Aiken autograph doesn't function the way, say, the foot of St. Cecila would function. I can't pray to Clay to heal me of disease, nor do I feel that the autograph has blessed my house. But I do feel that in having it, in being given it, I have partaken in the process of magical or mystical transformation that turns ordinary people into celebrities. And in giving me the autograph, Clay also partook in that transformation – should I say translation? Perhaps even transubstantiation? In the moment of gifting, Clay and I engaged in a relationship that both replicated and reinforced the larger give/take of the fan-celebrity dynamic. It's particularly potent, of course, with a celebrity like Clay, who became a celebrity through a reality t.v. show, and thus is even more representative of reciprocal exchange between the celebrity and the audience.
Labels: american idol, audience, celebrity, clay, idolatry, representation, tv
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