The Ephemeralism of What Passes for Mainstream Social Thought: The Supposed Demise of Celebrity Culture in 2020

Amid major shocks the commentariat tells us that great and profound cultural changes are at hand.

A little while later nothing changes--and the silly pronouncements are forgotten.

Exemplary of this is the claptrap we heard during the early months of the pandemic about the "end of celebrity" (in the New York Times and New York Post, at the BBC and in the Guardian, etc., etc., etc.) back when there was at least some acknowledgment of the severity of the crisis, and the reality that "We're not all in this together," that such catastrophe is one thing for the pampered and protected elite, a very different thing for the rest of humanity.

Today it is forgotten as if it never was (just as the pandemic, the Great Recession and much else are talked about as past when they are nothing of the kind). For my part I do think that the cult of celebrity may well be in decline--but for quite other reasons than the shift of social attitudes in a more egalitarian, socially aware, direction.

Then again, changes in social attitudes of that kind are something we would probably find acknowledged last by that mainstream media, given the ideological and personal blinkers of that apparatus' staff, and especially the portion of it that attends to celebrity culture--a rather revolting pack of courtiers and claqueurs for whom sucking up and punching down are not second nature, but first.