Celebrity Worship

From The Iliad to Us Weekly we have a long history of celebrity gossip.

From a piece in the Atlantic...

I am going to tell you a deep, dark secret. When I was 14 years old, Courtney Love was my idol. I got dressed every morning before high school by carefully layering ripped fishnets over purple tights, fastening the clasps on my vintage baby doll dress, combing out my peroxided hair, and adjusting my nose ring. The goal was this: if Courtney Love were to come to my high school and pick the coolest person there, she would surely pick me. It never occurred to me to wonder why she would be dropping by a small town in Rhode Island, or why, if she did so, she would hold some kind of high school fashion show. I knew only that I was dressing to impress.

Bear in mind please, that this was 1994 Courtney Love. Surely there were better role models at the time, but there were also worse. Kurt Cobain, Love's husband, had only just recently killed himself by shooting himself in the head in a small room above the family garage. This act of violence and finality shocked and bewildered me, and I remember feeling somewhat complicit in his death. He'd stated many times he didn't want to be a rock star. But I wanted him to be. As a confused and lonely teenager, I needed him to be. So my special relationship to Courtney Love was a kind of mourning, an atonement for a terrible act I had been powerless to prevent. If I could not save Kurt, I could be best friends with Courtney, and dressing just like her would prove how right we were for one another.

In Tom Payne's new book FAME: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity, he makes the argument that this kind of celebrity worship is anything but new. From Greek and Roman mythology to the tales of Dr. Faustus, Marie Antoinette, and the Christian martyrs, Payne shows how humans have been obsessed with fame and stardom throughout civilization. For all the contemporary hand-wringing over a culture overwhelmed by media gossip, Payne takes a well measured step back to argue that, "The media, they're us. Or at least the media are the people who buy newspapers and magazines...our tastes and desires affect how we take in the world around us."

Side note: The 18 biggest celebrity book deals of 2010, here.