Week 4 class presentation 2011.03.24

2. week 4

3. How to be an Idol?

4. Celebrity

5. Eliot’s answer...

8. ROLE
PLAY
GAME

10. CELEBRITY (WANNABE)
: 10
: 10
:5
PD:
:
:

11. THEORY
OF
CELEBRITY

13. Media is the
Message.

80. THEORY
OF
CELEBRITY

81. Celebrity = f (Hollywood, Washington, Wall St)

82. In his book The Image, published in 1958, the
historian Daniel Boorstin attributes the subsequent
bull market in “artificial fame” to the imbalance
between the limited supply of gods and heroes to be
found in nature and the limitless demand for their
appearance on a newsstand. Abundant and on-time
delivery of the product relies upon the willingness of
the consumer “to confuse the big name with the
big man,” to swallow the peach pit for the peach,
degrade “all fame into notoriety.”

83. McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in
the spring of 1964, sorting out the epistemological consequences of
the shift from print to film. The visual order of the printed page he
aligned with perceptions of the world biased in favor of hierarchy,
classification, and the force of argument. Perceptions of the world
furnished by the camera substitute montage for narrative, reprogram
the dimensions of space and time, restore a primitive belief in magic,
employ a vocabulary better suited to a highway billboard or the telling
of a fairy tale than to the languages of history and literature. The
camera sees but doesnʼt think. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral,
the object of its affection doesnʼt matter; what matters is the surge
and volume of emotion that it engenders and evokes, the floods of
consciousness drawn as willingly to a blood bath in Afghanistan as to
a bubble bath in Paris. As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of
images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the
meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of
cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from
anything else.

85. McLuhan ...

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87. As the lines between fact and fiction became as
irrelevant as they were hard to see, the various forms
of public performance were incorporated into what
became known as “media,” the several stores of value
weighed only in the scale of a Q or Nielsen rating.
News was entertainment and entertainment news.

88. The will to learn gives way to a being in the know,
which is the instant recognition of the thousands of
logos encountered in the course of a dayʼs shopping
and an eveningʼs programming.

89. The author of two best-selling book-length self-
promotions, Obama was elected by virtue of his
celebrity, a commodity meant to be sold at the
supermarket with the cosmetics and the canned soup,
elevated to the office of a totem pole.

90. Remarking on what remained of the reverence for monarchy in 1823, William
Hazlitt likens it to “a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in the popular
feeling, which must be gratified.” The dream-buying public wants a “peg or loop to
hang its idle fancies on, a puppet to dress up, a lay figure to paint from.” The
individual who cannot be all that he wishes to be looks for a mirror in which to
contemplate “his own pride, vanity, and passions, displayed in their most
extravagant dimensions…to see this reflex image of his own self-love, the darling
passion of his breast, realized, embodied out of himself in the first object he can
lay his hands on for the purpose.” The idol is best made from poor or
worthless raw material because it is then subject to the whim of its
manufacturer. The bargain is a Faustian one. The media affix price tags to
carcasses of temporary divinity, but in return for the gifts of fame and riches, they
require the king of the month or the queen for a day to make themselves available
to the ritual for the public feast. What was once a subject becomes an object, a
burnt offering placed on the altar of publicity.

91. Like the camera, the market moves but doesnʼt think,
drawn as willingly to the production of nuclear
warheads as to the growing of oranges or grapes. It
doesnʼt recognize such a thing as a poor celebrity.
Celebrity is money with a human face, the “pegs”
and “loops” on which to hang the dream of riches that
is “the darling passion” of the American breast.
Bipartisan and nondenominational, the hero with a
thousand faces unfortunately doesnʼt evolve into a
human being. Let money become the seat of power
and the font of wisdom, and the story ends with an
economy gone bankrupt, an army that wins no wars,
and a politics composed of brightly colored balloons.

95. Forget the whale. Did he beat his wife?
by Eliot Bu on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 5:37pm
Q: Should the life of the writer affect our valuation of the work?
In other words, if the writer was a stinker, do we boot the book out of the canon? Or, as The New York Times
Magazine put it in an article about Herman Melville, “Forget the whale. The big question is: Did he beat his wife?”
... ... ...
A: Those who believe that the purpose of literature is primarily moral are going to run into trouble if the book theyʼve
been using as a guide to living turns out to have been written by someone who beat his wife.
... ... ...
But if you believe, as I do, that great literature can be written by bad people, then your library can remain intact, no
matter how much respect you lose for the authors.
... ... ...
And even if there are no themes in the work that resonate with the life, great writers are not machines that produce,
out of nothingness, a series of words that happen to be more perfect than other peopleʼs words; they are flawed
mortals, often imprudent and uncivil, who are so large (thatʼs what greatness is: size) that every part of them
deserves to be understood.
- At Large and at Small (by Anne Fadiman)

96. Einstein once observed that the beauty as well as
the truth of science consists precisely in its
impersonality; the same can be said of law and
government. The founders of the American republic
assumed that otherwise ordinary men—if given the
instruments of law and institutions governing the uses
of those laws—can be trusted to conduct the business
of the state. Joseph Alsop expressed the eighteenth-
century sentiment accurately if somewhat
condescendingly when he described President
Richard Nixon as “a workable plumbing fixture.”

97. WHAT
ELIOT
THINKS

115. Pyramid

116. Louis XIV Versailles

117. Adolf Hitler Stadium at Nuremberg

118. Obama

119. ‘Stone’ was the preferred material for press
release.

120. Fame Machine

121. Vanity

122. “It’s all in the other person’s eyes.You can only
see aura on people you don’t know very well
or don’t know at all.”
- Andy Warhol

123. book example
magazine example
newspaper example
sns example

124. No-Face

126. watch video

127. Celebrity is No-Face.

147. .
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148. NAME

149. NAME
NOT
FAME

150. MY
NAME
ELIOT