What Makes a Famous Person a "Celebrity?"

When we speak of celebrity we generally seem to take for granted that "everyone knows" what the term means--perhaps less unreasonably than when using a great many other terms with a sociological significance, but still not unproblematically. After all, the simplest and most common definition of "celebrity" is "a famous person," but I think most will agree that fame by itself does not a celebrity make, many people quite famous without being celebrities properly speaking. The result is that it seems worth spelling out the concept.

For a start, there seems some expectation that a celebrity not only be famous, but famous with the general public for having "done something great"; that people in general know who they are; that we can speak of them as a "household name." By way of contrast with this consider the case of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. They are certain to be very well-known within their field. They are likely to get considerable media attention on the day that the Nobel Academy holds the awards ceremony. However, unless they somehow parlay their stature as a scientist into a broader "public intellectual" status, at least, very few people are likely to know who they are--in comparison with those categories of person we are more likely to associate with "celebrity," such as actors, singers and athletes.

The obscurity of even scientists at the top of their field by comparison with actors and singers and athletes seems importantly reflective of the logic of celebrity, which status (especially in our day) has a lot to do with a certain kind of individual visibility. If you are a celebrity people know your face, in part because they have seen the celebrity's face while they were doing what it was that made them famous. People saw them perform in a dramatic or musical production, or play in a game. By contrast a scientist's work, however hard, brilliant, important, publicized it may be, does not make for a "show" the same way. The work goes on largely in their heads, with its physical aspects conducted in laboratories away from public view, the evidences of what went on there presented to the world in their published papers unclear or even incomprehensible to the layperson, etc., etc., such that it simply cannot make the same impact on their imaginations. And while the public by and large retains an obsolete view of science as an intensively individualistic endeavor (because it serves certain political or dramatic purposes than for any other reason), it is harder to ignore the increasingly collaborative reality of the sciences. This is not just because there is typically a lot of less celebrated work paving the way for the "breakthroughs" that gets so much attention, but because anyone who can simply count notices how many names were on the byline of that paper reporting that important discovery, and the contrast it makes with the ferociously individual accomplishment with which celebrity is associated, which is typically expected to come from a particular place, namely talent that no "ordinary" person possesses and can never make up for the lack of no matter how hard they work--not diligence, but prowess. And of course, there is what is supposed to follow from exceptional prowess, namely wealth, luxury, adulation by the many, their being sought after and desired, others fantasizing about being them (or being with them, the aspect of sex not to be underrated, perhaps the more in as society is getting more puritanical about this)--in short, glamour. Few consider even the most accomplished scientist in such terms--as indeed scientists laugh (perhaps not without some bitterness) at the ridiculous glamorization of their field by Hollywood.

Taken altogether this picture--combining general renown, individual visibility achieved through personal prowess lending itself to visual display, and winning the visible rewards that prowess is supposed to win--seems to me to cover the territory--what in Veblenian terms is its essential simple-minded barbarism--pretty well, though I think it worthwhile to acknowledge that I am describing an ideal here at an extreme end of the spectrum, and that some may fall in between the questionable "celebrity" of a famed scientist at one end, the more conventional celebrity of a famed singer or athlete at the other.

At the same time the matter can be somewhat confused by those who ordinarily would not really make the cut but try to make it seem as if they do--people who are famous, but intent on being celebrities, and helped in their quest by their courtiers and claqueurs within a fairly willing media. As with plutocrats who seem unlikely candidates for the performance of any great artistic or athletic or any other sort of feat before the eyes of the public (which doesn't necessarily stop them from trying to be, say, Brazilian jiu-jitsu champions), but whom they shove their faces in our faces all the time as their partisans keep telling us what "geniuses" and "supermen" they are. ("Smarter than you, smarter than you!" they insist, the more stridently insofar as they know they are irritating us.) At the same time, living in the age of reality TV we are deluged with people who are highly visible without being in any evident way accomplished--one reason, I think, why I have personally been resistant to recognizing reality "stars" as celebrities--though in the culture in which we live it is common to think of "being rich and famous" as somehow a worthy achievement in itself, entirely befitting that Veblenian conception of barbarism on which all this ultimately rests.