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Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars.
Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the mean
- ISBN-13978-0520083530
- Edition1st
- PublisherUniversity of California Press
- Publication dateNovember 15, 2023
- LanguageEnglish
- File size7654 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
From the Inside Flap
"The most thoughtful and thoroughgoing sociological analysis I know of this strange and ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity. Intricately argued and elegantly written, frequently amusing and properly alarming, Claims to Fame deftly avoids either undervaluing or overvaluing the gullibility of the consumers of celebrity. Gamson--to use his own words--'mines . . . superficialities for their depths' and gives us more insight into the culture of entertainment than a dozen treatises on the 'resistant' potential of Madonna."--Todd Gitlin, University of California, Berkeley
"The best general account we have of the economic and representational parameters of contemporary celebrity. Claims to Fame would be worth reading simply for its lively and wonderfully detailed description of the 'celebrity industry' in Los Angeles. Yet, by tying this description to a compelling argument about the nature of our investment in celebrity images, the book does much more. It should have an important place in future discussions of the mass media and American culture."--Richard deCordova, DePaul University, author of Picture Personalities
"Insightful, well-written, replete with telling anecdotes, Claims to Fame demonstrates how one can critically analyze American culture without sneering at the American people."--Gaye Tuchman, author of Making News
From the Back Cover
"The most thoughtful and thoroughgoing sociological analysis I know of this strange and ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity. Intricately argued and elegantly written, frequently amusing and properly alarming, Claims to Fame deftly avoids either undervaluing or overvaluing the gullibility of the consumers of celebrity. Gamson―to use his own words―'mines . . . superficialities for their depths' and gives us more insight into the culture of entertainment than a dozen treatises on the 'resistant' potential of Madonna."―Todd Gitlin, University of California, Berkeley
"The best general account we have of the economic and representational parameters of contemporary celebrity. Claims to Fame would be worth reading simply for its lively and wonderfully detailed description of the 'celebrity industry' in Los Angeles. Yet, by tying this description to a compelling argument about the nature of our investment in celebrity images, the book does much more. It should have an important place in future discussions of the mass media and American culture."―Richard deCordova, DePaul University, author of Picture Personalities
"Insightful, well-written, replete with telling anecdotes, Claims to Fame demonstrates how one can critically analyze American culture without sneering at the American people."―Gaye Tuchman, author of Making News
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B003CN5QTW
- Publisher : University of California Press; 1st edition (November 15, 2023)
- Publication date : November 15, 2023
- Language : English
- File size : 7654 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Not enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 270 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,166,504 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,711 in History of Anthropology
- #3,814 in Popular Culture
- #4,167 in Cultural Anthropology (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I was born and raised--a Scorpio, naturally--in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then spent time in Israel, Boston, Berkeley, San Francisco, New Haven, New York City, and eventually landed back in the Bay Area. I went to college at Swarthmore, and got my PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley; I taught at Yale University for nine years, and now I teach at University of San Francisco. I married Richard Knight in 2004, and we have two kids, Reba Sadie (b. 2006) and Madeleine Blanche (b. 2009). www.joshuagamson.com
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What is at stake in the contemporary society of spectacle is the struggle for controlling the impact of the "signs of the real" (p. 7) over the mass of consumers and their possible resistance. The question of authenticity and realness has been present since the early celebrity consumer culture. Once a text is recognized as public and drowned into the flow of the social circulation, its ambivalence of being readable either in logical or mythological ways shapes it with an `inconvenient' edge; but in contemporary culture this problem is framed by the omnipresence and awareness of a third agent: the machine (p. 34) which is un-detachable from the celebrity-text. The industrial machinery increasingly is drawn into the narrative it produces, making the industrial process less a vehicle for the product and more a part of it, in a similar way as brands do to the commodities they label.
The still broadly accepted assumption in media studies stating that emancipation from authoritarian media depends on "demystifying" processes, achieving awareness by unveiling the machinery of production is challenged by Gamson when he demonstrates that alienation (production/consumer) is not overcome with information because information is immediately reconverted in entertainment. This finding invites further analyses to understand why and how Celebrity-watching audiences "bracket" evidence for the sake of maintaining their consumption not as endings but as instrumental mediations for their everyday ritualizations.
Audiences simultaneously play voyeuristic and performing roles (p. 139) making the axis of the watcher and the watched a superficial layer (a pre-text) "serving" underlying and ongoing conversations (both private and public).
A commonality in all sorts of interpretive communities is their joyful engagement in the decoding and reading of texts. Hermeneutic pleasures attired with playful attitudes are fully consonant with other meaning-making experiences where media consumption is used as a pre-textual resource, even in practices deemed as "serious" as religious practices . As seen with the "game players", there is an ability of decreeing at will the realness of an event, in spite of being acknowledged its fictitiousness. This contempt to what is real or fictional makes the former an irrelevant factor, as long as the story is kept as a sufficient resource for maintaining the social conversation. Hence, belief is self-consciously perceived as a matter of choice based on how much a belief suits ones' needs, since the text itself has no particular authority (p. 179).
Skepticism (truth and reality as undeterminable) is not a belligerent statement but a strategy to keep the conversation ongoing. In doing so, the text's original intention of being consumed as reliable information is subverted and reconverted into an ironic tool of resistance. The original alienation (the gap between the production and the consumer) and the implicit one-way communication model are not overcome, but this condition starts playing in favor of the consumers. In other words: consuming texts and playing games of truth with them reverse the dominating and objectifying relationship that traditionally texts exert upon readers, instead it is the reader the one who subjects the text in a way that what really matters is that the text doesn't really matter (p. 184). A social cognition implication of this is that open-coded consumption evidence a degree of distrust of the public and institutional selves (institutions of truth and social hypostasis, as Peter Berger likes to refer).
Juan Carlos Henriquez
PhD Program in Sociology
Boston College