Discussion with Sharon Marcus

Sharon Marcus

C21’s Graduate Student Bagel Hour on Friday, September 28th, had a special edition featuring an interesting discussion with Sharon Marcus from Columbia University on her new project, “The Drama of Celebrity: Imitation.”According to Marcus, celebrity tends to combine the normative and the anti-normative. Most celebrities embody paradoxes: they are masculine and feminine, normative (they are widely discussed, known, and recognized) and anti-normative (they are often both admired and hated).

The existing scholarship on celebrity and imitation in general has emphasized the imperative to imitate. The guiding assumption in the scholarship is that people want to imitate celebrities and doing so is an easy automatic reaction, encouraged by capitalism. However, in her research Marcus focused on a countervailing force saying: “you cannot, should not, and must not imitate celebrities. And that prohibition on imitation seemed to coalesce around less powerful social groups.”

Theories of celebrity have tended to focus on celebrity as either depriving people of agency or assigning super-agency to only one group: either media or fans or celebrities themselves. Marcus’s overarching thesis is that “celebrity is about distributed networked agency, and that it can both give and deprive all of those three groups of agency, but that celebrity culture itself consists of the interactions among those groups. It’s not a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon. And none of those groups ever definitively wrests the power to define who will be a celebrity or what the meaning of celebrity or fandom is.”

She ended her discussion by asking this question: Do digital-era forms of celebrity and fandom represent a change in degree, or in kind? Many scholars of celebrity see a break in recent decades with reality TV ushering in the era of celebrity as ordinariness. However, Marcus thinks this overlooks that the celebrity is still distinctive and is assigned a higher status. She believes that the digital platforms have shifted the emphasis to publics. “Whether it is imitation, or the acts of evaluation, the public engage in—voting, liking or not liking, commenting—or helping to spread the information that forms the content of celebrity culture, the line between media platforms and media users and the “objects” or “subjects” of media has blurred a lot more.”