Sociology of Celebrity from Franz Liszt to Lady Gaga

Abstract

Robert van Krieken’s Celebrity Society is not a book about American Idol, Paris Hilton, or TMZ.com. Lady Gaga rates a mention less for her own musings on The Fame Monster than as the “contemporary heiress” of Lola Montez, an actress, dancer, and courtesan famed throughout Europe in the early 1800s (p. 47). Readers looking for a monograph brimming with contemporary case studies will likely be disappointed. That said, this deeper timeline is a refreshing corrective to the presentism of many academic works on celebrity. While rooted in historical examples, van Krieken is certainly aware that the mechanisms of celebrity today are ever-changing and “much more complex, nuanced and extensive : : : than one would first appreciate” (p. x). Social media have enabled would-be celebrities to promote their amateur efforts in new ways, and media conglomeration has created even more possibilities for synergistic promotion of celebrity images. In such a slim volume, many such mechanisms are necessarily left unaddressed; despite the colorful cover photo of young women in headscarves clamoring for an unseen idol, the affective relationships of fandom are also beyond the scope of this book. Instead, van Krieken demonstrates that celebrity is not a 20th century phenomenon, as he traces back to the earliest uses of the term and to figures such as philosopher Jean-