Celebrity  

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This page Celebrity is part of the bread and circuses series. Illustration: Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872
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This page Celebrity is part of the bread and circuses series.
Illustration: Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872

Everybody is a star
I can feel it when you shine on me
I love you for who you are
Not the one you feel you need to be

--"Everybody Is a Star" (1969) by Sylvester Stewart


"On July 21 356 BC, a young man called Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. His motif? Fame."

Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. (La Joconde), is a 16th century oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and is one of the most famous paintings in the world.
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Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. (La Joconde), is a 16th century oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and is one of the most famous paintings in the world.
Napoleon was a VIP Illustration: Napoléon Bonaparte abdicated in Fontainebleau (1845) by Paul Delaroche
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Napoleon was a VIP
Illustration: Napoléon Bonaparte abdicated in Fontainebleau (1845) by Paul Delaroche

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Celebrity is the fame and public attention accorded by the mass media to individuals or groups or, occasionally, animals, but is usually applied to the persons or groups of people (celebrity couples, families, etc.) themselves who receive such a status of fame and attention. Celebrity status is often associated with wealth (commonly referred to as fame and fortune), while fame through entertainment are commonly associated with celebrity status, while political leaders often become celebrities. People may also become celebrities due to media attention on their lifestyle, wealth, or controversial actions, or for their connection to a famous person.

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Famous for being famous

Paris Hilton, famous for being famous

Famous for being famous, in popular culture terminology, refers to someone who attains celebrity status for no particular identifiable reason, or who achieves fame through association with a celebrity. The term is a pejorative, suggesting that the individual has no particular talents or abilities. Even when their fame arises from a particular talent or action on their part, the term will sometimes still apply if their fame is perceived as disproportionate to what they earned through their own talent or work.

15 minutes of fame

See also: 15 minutes of fame, One-hit wonder

Andy Warhol famously coined the phrase "15 minutes of fame". "Celebrities" in the 21st century can now be famous simply by being in the right place at the right time. Certain "15 minutes of fame" celebrities can be average people seen with an A-list celebrity, who are sometimes noticed on entertainment news channels. These "celebs" are regular people who originally are not celebrities, becoming celebrities, and are often turned into celebrities based on the ridiculous things they do. "In fact, many reality show contestants fall into this category: the only thing that qualifies them to be on TV is that they're real."

Certain people are only remembered today because of a movie portrayal, certain story or urban legend surrounding their life and less for their accomplishments. Antonio Salieri was a famous and well-known 18th-century composer, but his fictional portrayal as an antagonist (for example, in the musical and film Amadeus) has been more famous than his music since the end of the 20th century. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and O. J. Simpson are more notorious for their association with murder trials than for their respective movie and sports careers. Ronald Reagan is more famous as a politician today than as a movie actor. Centuries after his death, Andrea Mantegna is now better known as the mentor of Leonardo da Vinci than for his own paintings.

Social networking

Celebrities have been flocking to social networking and video hosting sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and MySpace. Social networking sites allow celebrities to communicate directly with their fans, removing the middle-man known as traditional media. Social media humanizes celebrities in a way that arouses public fascination as evident by the success of magazines such as People Weekly. Celebrity blogging have also spawned stars such as Perez Hilton who is well known for not only blogging, but also outing celebrities.

Posthumous fame

Some creators such as poets, artists, musicians, and inventors are little-known and little-appreciated during their lives but are feted as brilliant innovators after their deaths. A desire to achieve this type of posthumous fame may have motivated Alan Abel, Adam Rich, and Pauly Shore to stage their deaths. In some cases, after historians uncover a creator's role in developing some cultural or technical process, the contributions of these little-known individuals become more widely known.

Sometimes a false death mention can cause a person to rethink their legacy. Alfred Nobel founded the Nobel Prizes after an erroneous obituary labeled him a "merchant of death" due to his invention and selling of dynamite.

People who were far more famous after their deaths than during their lifetime (and often were completely or relatively unknown) include painter Bob Ross; Greek philosopher Socrates; scientist Galileo Galilei; Romantic poet John Keats; painter Vincent van Gogh; poet and novelist Edgar Allan Poe; singers Eva Cassidy and Nick Drake; comedian Bill Hicks; writer Emily Dickinson; artist Edith Holden, whose 1906 diary was a best-seller when published posthumously in 1977; writer Franz Kafka; singer Jeff Buckley; diarist Anne Frank; philosopher Søren Kierkegaard; writer John Kennedy Toole (who posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 12 years after his death); author Stieg Larsson (who died with his Millennium novels unpublished); musician, artist and poet Rozz Williams.

Herostratus, a young Greek man arsoned the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) in 356 BC to immortalize his name. Although authorities at the time tried to erase him from history and punished people with the death penalty for even merely mentioning his name, he succeeded in achieving lasting fame, as his name is well known today.


See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Celebrity" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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