Commodification Of The Celebrity Image

The reduction of well-known people to their image leads to a process of commodification, and of course, consumption of that commodity. The role of capitalism in the west, and it’s rapid adoption in America, creates a culture of consumption; though the rise of technology surely provided additional tools, Amy Henderson draws a clearer line between the creation of celebrities and consumption, arguing that celebrities mark a nation’s transition from a producing society to a consuming one [Henderson, 1992]. But while the commodification of the celebrity image makes it consumable, and leads to celebrities being employed by companies to market products to us (from credit cards to airline tickets), it also makes it disposable; celebrities today have to strive to outlive the sell-by dates of the products they are employed to promote. The commodified celebrity image can be thrown out as quickly as it can be created; the fate of any singer with a one-hit song, or actor who became pigeon-holed by a single role. The fodder can suffer just as much as the devouring hordes, who spend their time and money on fictionalized ideals.
Regardless of the destructive nature of celebrity culture, it still begs the question of whether there is an evolutionary basis from which this celebrity status is springing from. Dr. Jamie Tehrani, an Anthropologist at the University of Durham, thinks there is an evolutionary reason we follow celebrities. He works off of the notion of prestige and social status, which can be bestowed upon someone for a particularly beneficial adaptive skill, like a hunting technique; just as hunters will try to imitate the most successful hunter of the group, by sharpening their tools with the same motions, or performing the same ritual...

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...t as for who remembers Sean Connery, or John Wayne, or John Lennon, people whose greatest accomplishment was to provide simple entertainment to the masses, and the answer becomes very different. Sure, Jan Oort did get the Oort cloud named after him, but again the number of people who even know what the Oort cloud is, is sadly few compared to the numbers of people who have memorized the lyrics of any Coldplay song. On a certain level, given these challenges of existence, it makes perfect sense to want to be a celebrity; who wouldn’t want a captive audience willing to care about the things they care about, or hold their opinion above others? There is immense communicative power involved in such a master-slave voice relationship; to the celebrity’s followers, that celebrity carries more weight than most humans on earth, and that can be an intoxicating drug for anyone.