About an hour and a half out of London on a slow-as-molasses train, one arrives in the gray city of Nottingham, a former center of lace making and bastion of the Industrial Revolution, known for its Sherwood Forest, the legendary home of Robin Hood and his band of thieves. Today, however, while progress has passed this city by, Nottingham has become renowned within some circles as the headquarters for one of the most byzantine and zealous subcultures in the world. Seemingly far removed from anything most of us experience in our daily lives, this subculture tells us something very important about the way celebrity operates.
Within one of the city’s dreary industrial estates there is a compound filled with moats, sculpted castle walls, and strange creatures that draws thousands upon thousands of visitors from countries as far away as Japan. Couples plan their honeymoons to include a stop at this compound, still others travel thousands of miles to attend the annual autumn event that brings up to fifteen thousand fans. One man I spoke with packed up all his belongings and moved from Indiana to Nottingham, knowing not a soul there, just for the chance to work at the compound. His story is not unique. In fact, countless people from around the world come to Nottingham for the same reason: to be a part of an exclusive world with its own media, jargon, exciting members-only events, and of course, access to the celebrities who reign supreme within this subculture.
Welcome to Warhammer World, where Tyranids (bioengineered races of evil creatures) relentlessly attempt to control the world and only the Tau (aliens working for the greater good) are able to save you. Aggressive battles take place in space, in the Milky Way Galaxy, for example (controlled by the Imperium of Man), and can play out over the course of one thousand years. Warhammer is one of the oldest and most popular fantasy creations, alongside Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings. Like its counterparts, Warhammer has been the subject of novels and comic books and provides great entertainment for ten- to fourteen-year-old boys around the world. Also similar to Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer fans have a chance to role-play and act out various battles and scenarios within this fantasy world, which they do with miniatures standing 1.1 inches high. The Warhammer World fantasy games use an intricate collection of props, rule books, miniatures, and paints to enact the battles among the various creatures. Armies are designated by the special colors used to paint them.
Do not let the fantastical nature of this enterprise fool you; Warhammer World is also the name of the Nottingham compound that acts as the headquarters for Games Workshop, the company that produces very profitable war games revolving around science fiction or fantasy themes including Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 (the latter takes place in the forty-first millennium).1 The compound also acts as the meeting place for hobbyists from around the world, hosting events and open game nights where enthusiasts can bring their miniatures and stage battles on one of the many Astroturf tabletops. At any given time, half a dozen battles might be going on throughout the compound. Similarly, in all Games Workshop stores, tables covered in fake grass are set up so that hobbyists can come in to play each other. At the same time, battles, dramatic climaxes, and great defeats are going on around the world in workshops from Los Angeles to Jimbocho, Tokyo.
Warhammer World defines the very existence of those who live and breathe the games. Besides younger boys, the active hobbyists are men in their late twenties and early thirties, who picked up the hobby again later in life, and who, with more disposable income, are able to establish the large collection of miniatures necessary to become serious players. Thousands upon thousands of people devote mind-boggling amounts of time and money—some their entire lives—to participating in Games Workshop. Unlike playing with Barbie or miniature cars, participating in Games Workshop requires real skill. One must learn how to paint the miniatures required for playing and acquire extraordinary knowledge of the rules of the game. Even to participate requires a hobbyist to make it a top priority. Specialist games have been created for “veterans” who have been playing for many years and need more challenging scenarios. One Games Workshop manager who gave me the lay of the land was, like most employees, a hobbyist himself, which is why he became manager of a local store. In general, managers are not usually working at Games Workshop to pay the bills. They know the games intimately, who the major players are, and a bit about the groups of kids who come in, day after day, to play. And they too have their own miniatures, read the hobby’s glossy events magazine, White Dwarf, and participate in battles. Some hobbyists join the Facebook groups that allow them to talk about their favorite battles, the people they respect the most in Games Workshop, and the events they’re attending. Games Workshop has become such a distinct subculture that hobbyists would no sooner compare themselves to other war games such as Dungeons and Dragons (despite the obvious similarities) than they would to American Girl doll or Barbie collectors.
To understand the Games Workshop phenomenon, one must go back to when it all began. Originating in a bedroom in London in 1974, the hobby company was initially a small mail-order gig founded by Ian Livingstone, John Peake, and Steve Jackson. In the beginning, they sold wooden board games and distributed Dungeons and Dragons to British consumers. In their effort to expand the company, the trio started creating games of their own. In 1975, to spread the word, they produced a company newsletter called Owl and Weasel, superseded shortly thereafter by White Dwarf in 1977, which still functions as Games Workshop’s key publication and is sold around the world. It contains listings of upcoming events, updates on major battles, and profiles of leading gamers. In 2001, their coup was landing a licensing deal with Lord of the Rings, which is now their most popular game next to Warhammer 40,000. There are more than a thousand Games Workshop locations around the world, and the number grows each month. Gauging the number of hobbyists is virtually impossible given that such an estimation would have to include those who use the websites that sell secondhand or painted miniatures, along with people who play the games, people who don’t play but paint miniatures, people who simply buy miniatures in the Games Workshop stores (or Hobby Centers, as they are also called), those who buy them from other outlets, and those who do not own their own sets but borrow their friends’ miniatures. While Warhammer World was not forthcoming with many exact numbers, the Nottingham compound alone is a destination for more than fifty thousand visitors a year. The business has developed into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, complete with rights to Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Doctor Who, and Judge Dredd.
White Dwarf and the Games Workshop’s annual Games Day (the annual conference, established in 1975, that attracts thousands of hobbyists) were game changers, quite literally. By creating a worldwide publication and an annual event, Games Workshop was able to connect localized communities and enthusiasts to other avid hobbyists around the world. While there are Games Days held around the world, the Birmingham Games Day is the biggest event worldwide and has become an important backdrop to put hobbyists and Games Workshop creators into physical contact, while also generating more buzz about the hobby. White Dwarf created a platform for gamers to regularly exchange information, showcase upcoming events, and celebrate top gamers. Like in any other industry or hobby, the high-profile gamers are known for a particular talent: whether it’s battle strategy, painting miniatures, or winning games. These “experts” are covered in great detail in White Dwarf, with photos and profiles, and consequently enthusiasts recognize the top gamers and celebrated designers when they walk into a Games Workshop location. Through the Tournament Circuit, gamers are able to compete with one another, accrue points, and increase their rankings.
Holding court in the Warhammer universe is Jervis Johnson, Games Workshop designer, columnist for White Dwarf, revered in the Games Workshop subculture for the past two decades, and by far the most renowned member of the Workshop community. A slight, balding man of about fifty, Jervis is one of the key contributors to the Warhammer 40,000 game (also known as Warhammer 40K). There is one guaranteed time and place where avid fans will get the chance to meet Jervis: Games Day. Even in the pouring rain (which tends to be frequent in England), hobbyists stand in lines round the block from early in the morning, waiting to get in. Some come early to get the limited-edition miniatures, others to heckle the rule book authors about new criteria in a particular game, and still others to talk to the miniature designers, who are revered in the community. Jervis is mostly adored, sometimes criticized, but world renowned within the Games Workshop community. In the same moment that one gamer is proudly uploading photos of himself and Jervis playing Warhammer at the compound, another will be ranting on the Facebook discussion board about the publication of another Games Workshop rule book. One angry hobbyist ranted, “What a pile of shit the new rules are they need to stop thinking about MONEY all the time and think about the people who have been doing the hobby for years…This all happening about 4pm today it’s now 1.20am and am still pissed off.” No matter their opinion of Jervis, however, it is undisputable that he has achieved legendary, iconic status among Games Workshop players. One enthusiast’s photo uploaded on a Facebook discussion board came with the explanation, “That’s actually [Jervis’s] shoulder next to me in the picture.”
Celebrity Everywhere
You might notice something that I discovered myself: Despite the apparent discrepancy between Games Workshop and, say, the Academy Awards ceremony, these events and their attendees are connected by an important concept: Relative celebrity, whereby small-scale celebrity is a fractal version of mainstream stardom. Games Workshop is as far removed from Hollywood as possible, but the Nottingham-based subculture creates stars and fans just like its glamorous Los Angeles counterpart. Jervis’s celebrity oversteps his talent: He is a brilliant designer, but fans also get excited about photos that capture a few inches of his shoulder. Fan obsession with gaming stars and Jervis mirrors obsession with Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, or any other conventional star. And, just as Jennifer Aniston’s fan base ebbs and flows, there are opportunities for the relative celebrity to increase or decrease his star power.
When I asked one Games Workshop store manager about stars like Jervis, he wasn’t sure why this question needed to be asked. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing unique about Games Workshop fandom and the celebrity of particular members of the community. To him, this story could be found in all realms where celebrity and an audience exist. As he put it to me in a rather no-duh fashion, “You always get that, with everything. It’s the same as everything else, isn’t it?”
Relative celebrities exist in all of our own worlds, in our hobbies, social groups, and families. Jervis is a perfect example of someone removed from traditional versions of celebrity—Hollywood, baseball players, supermodels—and yet just like them. There are five important lessons about relative celebrity that we can learn from Jervis and Warhammer World. First, to be clear, relative celebrities are not necessarily on the road to full-fledged everyone-in-the-world-knows-your-name celebrity.2 Relative celebrities are not subsets of the “real thing.” Relative celebrities exist autonomously within their own professions, on their own scale, and with their own adoring public.3 Make no mistake: Jervis Johnson is the star of his show. Jervis showing up at Games Day means as much to Workshop hobbyists as Barack Obama’s acceptance speech means to America at large and Angelina Jolie’s presence at the Academy Awards means to her fans. Hobbyists queue for hours for the chance to meet him. But his celebrity is independent of Hollywood, politics, or other versions of conventional stardom. Jervis is not on a path to being bigger or better known. Jervis has reached his peak in his relative celebrity world.
Second, context is everything. Relative celebrities are distinctly linked to the particular context in which they become stars. Jervis from Games Workshop is a star around the world but only within the Games Workshop community. In the Nottingham compound or at the Birmingham Games Day, fans clamor to speak with him, but the average person on a New York City street could not pick him out in a lineup. This lopsidedness goes the other way too: Stars like Paris Hilton would not be nearly as interesting to Games Day attendees as is Jervis. Although she may stop traffic in the streets of Los Angeles, most gamers view Paris Hilton as a minor distraction (more likely an annoying interloper) as they make their way into Warhammer World to speak with Jervis.
Let’s return to M. M continues to be a Facebook celebrity, but if we removed Facebook he would cease to be a star in my microworld. The same can be said for anyone’s high school crush: Did you ever notice that the person who you crushed on in high school often had an extensive trail of admirers, making you feel all the more certain he or she would never give you the time of day? In high school, most crush objects are relative celebrities: Lots of people have crushes on the same few crushees and collectively speculate about all aspects of their life, from where they hang out on a Friday night to whom they’re going to the prom with. But the crush’s celebrity rests on being in high school. Without high school, there is no context in which to attain information about this individual or for him or her to cultivate a collective group of admirers. Almost all relative celebrity emerges from four different (but not mutually exclusive) channels: career, geographic ties, social network, and subculture.4 Without the fan base that surfaces from these particular contexts, a relative celebrity ceases to exist.5
Third, like major athletes or film actors, relative celebrities rely on certain outlets and events, which are also context specific, to establish and affirm their celebrity status. For Jervis, it is Games Day and the pages of White Dwarf. For Hollywood stars, it is the Oscars and the Vanity Fair Oscar party and various celebrity magazines from US Weekly to OK! to People. For the local sports star, it is the Friday night football game, the write-up in the local newspaper, and homecoming, where he is not only the star football player but also likely on the homecoming court. M, our definitive example of the relative celebrity, attains his stardom through various social media sites that distribute information about him and his fabulous life.6
The fourth lesson is that relative celebrity is fluid. Just like any Hollywood star who moves from B- to A-list, relative celebrities have the chance to move up the food chain, becoming bigger versions of celebrity within their relative worlds. A truly talented high school football player who is recruited to play for Notre Dame or Ohio State or the University of Southern California moves up his relative-celebrity hierarchy. In a few years, if he is successful in his collegiate playing, he may be given another chance at moving up if offered a contract with the NFL. If he takes the offer, he becomes that small-town football player who went pro, thus increasing his celebrity locally while moving up a tier within his sport. Not everyone moves up all or even any of these steps. The football player has the option to decline the mountains of scholarships awaiting him and stay in his small town. He will remain a relative celebrity, for sure, as that former high school athletic star, taken from Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” but his rank in his relative celebrity world remains static and with time his stardom will decrease as new former high school football stars take his place. Jervis, however, has not chosen the static option. He’s been moving up the ranks of relative celebrity for decades. As a columnist for White Dwarf, the chief designer for Warhammer World, and one of the main attractions of Games Day, there’s no higher echelon of stardom for Jervis to achieve in his world.
Finally, relative celebrity relies on an element of exclusivity. Gamers may want stardom in their world, but they’re not interested in anyone invading it, just like Vanity Fair keeps a strict list of who gets to enter its Oscar party. I’ve found it harder to gain access to the top members of Warhammer World than to the top Hollywood publicists. Games Workshop has zero interest in being documented or capitalized upon by hungry mainstream media looking for innovative stories and topics to cover. When MTV inquired about doing a documentary on Warhammer World, the network was denied access. (You can bet if MTV wanted to do a documentary on the average indie rock band or Hollywood starlet, doors would open before they finished their request.)
These principles of relative celebrity demonstrate that celebrity exists everywhere, in many forms. Stars as seemingly dissimilar as Jervis Johnson and Jennifer Aniston emerge from the same fundamental conditions: Particular contexts, events, and outlets create and affirm each star’s celebrity status and exclusivity; fans are uniquely obsessed with these stars within these contexts; and both Aniston and Johnson are able to become more or less celebrated within their respective worlds. Most people tend to view subcultures like Games Workshop as something akin to a carnival’s House of Oddities and Freaks. We judge these worlds differently, as if Hollywood actors and annual Academy Awards and Oscar parties in Los Angeles are fundamentally different from gamer aficionados and their annual Games Day in Birmingham. However, when you get down to it, there is very little distinction between how these two remarkably different worlds create celebrity. While Games Workshop celebrities do not seek representation in the pages of US Weekly, they do appear on the game message boards, are written up in White Dwarf, and make the rounds at Games Day. Hollywood has a larger market and is followed more in popular culture, but Games Workshops and small-town football players are simply smaller versions of Hollywood’s star system.
The Mainstream Celebrity
Scale is an important factor that explains the radical difference between Aniston’s and Johnson’s position within the larger phenomenon of celebrity. So far, we’ve seen that celebrities exist in many cultures, industries, and places, and that relative celebrities tend to be created and perpetuated through similar processes. Yet there are celebrities that both Games Workshop hobbyists and my mother are aware of—Aniston is and Jervis is not one of these shared stars. Mainstream celebrities are those everyone knows about, usually emerging from sports, politics, music, or Hollywood. Like other celebrities, mainstream celebrities arise from specific contexts and industries, but because the creation and reportage of their celebrity are cultivated through mainstream, widespread media, lots of people know about them. This amplification and exposure set them apart from the relative celebrity.
Angelina Jolie is revered by Hollywood, but even if her Hollywood public ceased to exist, she would have a collective public stretching from Kansas City to Paris that would buy magazines with her face on the cover. Sure, Jervis has White Dwarf, but US Weekly and OK! are sold at newsstands around the world.7 Jervis’s celebrity has to be actively sought out if one is not a Games Workshop hobbyist. Mainstream celebrities attain such status not because they are fundamentally different from relative celebrities but because there are so many more avenues to learn of their existence.8
Yet even mainstream celebrities are relative in certain contexts. Tom Cruise, perhaps the definitive example of a mainstream celebrity in Western culture, is for all intents and purposes a relative celebrity in India. He is known by Indians, but he is not nearly as celebrated as his Bollywood counterparts. Bollywood, the term used to describe India’s film industry, centered in Mumbai, produces some eleven hundred films a year (twice the number of films produced in the United States) and sells 3.6 billion movie tickets (compared to America’s 2.6 billion).9
Shahrukh Khan, arguably the most famous Bollywood actor, reigns front and center. Known as “King Khan,” he began as a television actor in the 1980s and then burst onto the film scene in 1992 with Deewana. Since then, Khan has appeared in seventy-five films, produced nine films, and appeared on and hosted multiple television programs. His 2007 film Chak De India was the third-highest-grossing film that year, generating $20 million.10 At forty-five, Khan is a handsome man who is every bit the archetypal film star, and one often sees photographs of him splashed across India’s celebrity tabloids (which are even more feverish in their documenting of stars’ lives than their American and British equivalents).
Many Westerners may not be aware of Shahrukh Khan’s existence (despite the installation of a Khan wax figure in the London Madame Tussauds), but calculating the total number of films Khan appears in and the number of tickets that are purchased to see him shows that he is far and away more worshipped than any Hollywood actor.11 “On a global scale, Khan has twice as many fans as Tom Cruise,” explains Mark Lorenzen, a professor at Copenhagen Business School and an expert on Bollywood. “All the Indians, both in India and abroad, all the Pakistanis, all the Bangladeshis, lots of Arabs and lots of Asians are Khan fans.” Shahrukh Khan is by all accounts the biggest movie star in the world.12
India’s population of 1.13 billion versus the U.S. population of 304 million ensures a superior fan base, and the Indian diasporas of the 1990s that spread to the United States, Britain, and the Middle East distributed Bollywood culture and Khan’s celebrity worldwide. The United States and Britain alone account for 50–60 percent of Bollywood’s export revenue, and Bollywood is the largest foreign contributor to the U.S. entertainment market.13 And it is growing larger all the time: In 2009, Reliance, a Bollywood film company, invested $325 million in Hollywood’s Dreamworks.14
Yet the same cannot be said for Hollywood’s influence on India’s film market, where Hollywood has just a 4 percent share.15 “Hollywood has tried to enter into India unsuccessfully,” Lorenzen explains. “Fox and Universal Pictures have tried to lure the big Indian stars over. They were not able to lure the biggest stars because the biggest stars didn’t really care about Hollywood…because their home market is so enormous. Indian stars are very, very wealthy, just as wealthy as their A-list Hollywood counterparts. If you can compare what they get for their money, they’re actually wealthier. Many of them have massive personal fortunes.” Indeed, Khan turned down one of the lead roles in Danny Boyle’s Academy Award–winning Slumdog Millionaire, a film about a young boy growing up in the slums of Mumbai who becomes a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?16
For many Westerners, both Bollywood and Khan seem like far lesser examples of star power than their own A-listers. However, on a global scale, Indian celebrities have a much greater fan base than most Western stars (barring perhaps Michael Jackson). By definition, our Western top-tier celebrities are relative in the sense that their renown is created from the perspective from which we are viewing them; they are not, in other words, absolute. “Indians know the Tom Cruises and Brad Pitts,” Lorenzen remarks. “They are impressed with them, but Cruise’s and Pitt’s impression upon the Indian public is very weak compared to the Indian stars. Indians are so unimpressed with Western stars compared to Bollywood and their cricket stars.”
Bollywood celebrity is so tantalizing and so mainstream that no aspiring star in the industry views going to Hollywood as an enticing prospect because Hollywood does not offer them a greater form of celebrity. “For those who haven’t made it to the highest level,” Lorenzen explains, “it would be a real opportunity cost to disappear to Hollywood.” Bollywood may seem like a source of relative celebrity to the average American, but the converse is true as well: Hollywood celebrities are smaller stars to a fan in India. Celebrity almost always rests on context, whether geographical, cultural, or through the media channels necessary to create it.
The Currency of Star Power
In 2003, the Observer, the Sunday edition of Britain’s left-leaning newspaper the Guardian, ran a faintly ridiculous article titled, “Why Brits with Brains Are the Big Apple’s New Blondes,” which was a treatise on the rise of the British academic as American celebrity.17 The reporter, barely concealing her amusement, observed that British professors were being wined, dined, and handed fabulous apartments in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, fully embraced by American academe. Case in point was Niall Ferguson, the dashing Oxford-educated Scottish historian with a knack for writing best sellers on economic history. At Oxford, Ferguson felt that all professors were treated as, in his words, “equally brilliant,” but individual stardom was frowned upon. He greeted American academic celebrity with bemusement. The article went on to comment on rumors that Ferguson, having been lured from Oxford to New York University, was being poached from NYU by Harvard. Sure enough, within a year, Ferguson was a chaired professor at Harvard. On his trajectory from Oxford to Harvard, Ferguson achieved a major multibook contract from Penguin and his own TV series.
After reading the article, one might initially think that the reporter was making much of a random anomaly. How many good-looking, well-dressed professors could the halls of academe really produce? But something in her story rang true. The New York Observer picked up the article, and New York’s snarky gossip blog, Gawker, reported on the Observer story with great fanfare. A few months later, David Kirp, a professor at Berkeley, wrote a New York Times op-ed on the “star wars” of academe, devoting much of his argument to Ferguson’s case.18
I met Ferguson in the summer of 2009 to quiz him about financial celebrities (he believes they don’t exist). I met him at the Union Square Cafe, a publishing industry see-and-be-seen hangout, where Ferguson had just finished lunch with a fellow academic superstar. During our meeting, some seemingly Important Person stopped by our table and made plans with Ferguson to meet up in the British Airways lounge at JFK that evening, before they both caught a flight to London. After our meeting, Ferguson had to race to a TV interview. In an immaculate linen suit and with perfectly disheveled hair, Ferguson was the picture of what Vogue would mock up should Anna Wintour create a fantasy fashion shoot on academics. He sure didn’t look like any of the professors I had at Columbia. A few weeks later, a friend happened to see Niall Ferguson’s name in my e-mail in-box. She gasped, “Is that the Niall Ferguson? The author? Oh my God, he is so hot.” How, I ask you, is this any different from the average reaction to Brad Pitt?
Ferguson is the new face of academic celebrity. He is good-looking, charismatic, articulate, and not painfully esoteric. He does his research, but he knows how to write in plain English. In the last decade, the image of the professor with a corduroy jacket and pocket protector has rapidly given way to a figure more engaging and interesting to the wider public.19 Websites have sprung up where students can anonymously but publicly evaluate their professors’ charisma (or lack thereof); RateMyProfessors.com allows students to vote on whether their professors are “hot” or “not.” Professors get mentioned in gossip columns and blogs, write best-selling books, and travel around the world with celebrities. The Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs promotes poverty awareness with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. U2’s Bono wrote the foreword to Sachs’s The End of Poverty. The former Harvard sociologist Cornel West produces music, appeared in The Matrix: Reloaded and The Matrix: Revolutions, and made front-page news around the country when Harvard president Laurence Summers told him to put the hip-hop gear away and conduct some more serious research. West left for a more appreciative Princeton. This development was covered by popular media, with every turn detailed on the front page of the New York Times. Again, I ask, how is any of this different from the mainstream celebrity coverage we are accustomed to?20
Academic celebrity is a perfect example of relative celebrity.21 It’s always existed in the form of the academic star system, which for the most part remained inside the university. In recent years, however, the star professor has attained a public following among people unrelated to his or her field. And thus we get to a final facet of relative celebrity: All relative celebrity has an exchange rate between relative and mainstream. Like any currency, the rate changes continually, and some relative celebrity has a stronger exchange value than others.
Consider it like this: Ferguson was a star within academia for quite a while. His rapid moves from Oxford to NYU to Harvard would have made his star power fodder for gossip in the halls of universities. But when mainstream publications like Gawker started covering Ferguson as they might Angelina Jolie, his star power ceased to be merely relative and constrained within the context of the university. By virtue of being written about by popular media, Ferguson was now known by people who read Gawker, the New York Times, the New York Observer, and so forth, people not necessarily affiliated with academic politics or gossip. Ferguson’s celebrity was becoming less relative and more mainstream. Of course Ferguson had not attained the visibility of Brad Pitt, but he was not relevant only within his immediate academic context. Ferguson’s celebrity was transforming, and not simply because his books were being read by a wider audience. By the very definition of celebrity, his stardom was transcending his talent as a historian. Mainstream journalism was speculating about him as a person, and regular folks were gushing about his attractiveness (including my friend and, in full disclosure, my aunt as well). When Ferguson’s marriage broke up in February 2010, the Daily Mail ran a huge story on its demise, including gossip about his new girlfriend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a lawyer and a former member of the Dutch parliament who penned the highly critical and controversial script for the film Submission in addition to the widely acclaimed books Infidel and Nomad. Submission’s director, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 and Ali, currently under police protection at all times, has a fatwa over her head. The article discussed in detail Ferguson’s multiple homes, jet-set lifestyle, and hobnobbing with the British political elite. One source claimed that Ferguson’s wife was shocked that he had begun “conducting a private life in a manner more akin to that of a Premiership footballer than a professor.”22 Gawker summed up the Ferguson report simply: “Sex! Scandal! Murderous Muslim Clerics! This Story Has It All.”23
Ferguson contemporary Nouriel Roubini is another academic transforming from relative to mainstream celebrity. Roubini, a New York University economist, became renowned due to his prescience in predicting the burst of the real estate bubble and the potential collapse of the U.S. economy several years before these events occurred.24 Roubini, also known as “Dr. Doom,” for his dark economic forecasts, unfortunately turned out to have been remarkably accurate in his predictions.25 Consequently, Roubini has attained a worldwide following, giving speeches and interviews around the world and penning opinion pieces. Roubini is also a regular subject of Gawker’s gossipy posts. Gawker, however, is not interested in Roubini’s economic analysis as much as his celebrity lifestyle. The site has devoted several postings to the NYU professor’s “very hard partying,”26 including an uploaded photo album of the economist with young ladies (and fashion designer Marc Jacobs) at Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s 2010 New Year’s bash in St. Barts.27 Back in March 2009, in a posting titled “Nouriel Roubini Copters His Way Back Home,” Gawker dissected both the photos the economist uploaded on his Facebook profile documenting him alongside good-looking women, and his status updates, including one stating “Nouriel is taking a coptor to the airport as São Paulo car traffic is THE worst in the world.” The article commented, “Roubini, a doomsaying economist who’s as well-known for his Tribeca loft parties as his increasingly grandiose predictions of worldwide economic collapse, took a break from wooing young women on Facebook to post a few photos of a copter ride in Brazil.” When asked in a Financial Times profile what he thought of his newfound stardom, Roubini merely sighed, “Celebrity has become a burden.”28
Partially, Ferguson’s and Roubini’s increasing relevance to a more mainstream fan base can be explained by the media’s new interest in academic stars as viable people to report on and speculate about. In another era, Gawker might not have cared about Ferguson’s or Roubini’s rising star power; and if the media hadn’t cared, these academics would have remained relative celebrities, moving up the ranks of academic celebrity but unknown to the mainstream public. Like Jervis, Ferguson and Roubini would have been at the pinnacle of their relative celebrity but nothing more. However, to use the currency metaphor, academics with relative celebrity now have a stronger exchange rate with mainstream celebrity than ever before. Best-selling academic authors like Richard Dawkins, Jeffrey Sachs, and Steve Levitt made the idea-driven book de rigueur reading, catalyzing a deluge of more best-selling books by academics and public intellectuals. Academics no longer shy away from mainstream media, many of them showing up on TV shows, writing opinion pieces, and hiring agents like anyone interested in becoming a celebrity might do.
Two things must happen for a relative celebrity to become mainstream: Mass media needs to report on the individual and the public needs to respond with interest. Exchange rates between relative and mainstream celebrity fluctuate because they reflect changes in consumer tastes and media interest. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the relative celebrities who have become mainstream are Internet stars and reality TV contestants. Conversely, when the public grows bored or moves on to a new fixation, the exchange value of a particular type of star goes down.
Consider the rise and fall of artists as mainstream stars in the United States.29 At the turn of the twentieth century, most artists were still fairly unknown. They may have painted portraits of famous people, but the mainstream media and public did not celebrate them as stars. In the 1950s, however, the Abstract Expressionists had a general public who recognized and was fascinated by their lives.30 By the 1980s, Andy Warhol and his crew of pop artists were genuine celebrities, hanging out at Studio 54 with Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and being written up by columnists everywhere.31 It was Warhol himself who said, “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in inches.” Since the late 1980s, however, American visual artists’ relative-celebrity currency exchange with mainstream stardom has decreased. In the mid-2000s, barring a few exceptions like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, the general public does not obsess about the art world. Artists are stars of their own (relative) worlds, but society is not collectively interested in them in the way it cares about Hollywood actors or musicians or reality TV stars.
The currency of stars is also different depending on where they are located. In Europe, soccer players are of great interest to the general public; they are both relative celebrities to soccer aficionados and mainstream celebrities. Not a day goes by without some footballer being featured in the Sun for cheating on his wife, getting in a bar fight, or proposing to his model girlfriend (his last game statistics are somewhere in the back of the paper). Whereas in America, most people would recognize only David Beckham or perhaps Ronaldo (who in the summer of 2009 signed the largest soccer contract in history) as mainstream stars. And, as mentioned earlier, Ronaldo’s recognition in America can partially be explained by his romantic dalliance with Paris Hilton. Soccer stars aren’t as celebrated in America, mainly because soccer isn’t as popular a spectator sport in the United States as it is in Europe and England.
Ferguson’s move from relative toward mainstream celebrity was predicated on the media’s interest and the public responding. This is why his public profile rose simultaneously with his relative rise in academia. All relative celebrity is fluid, but most relative celebrity is vertically fluid: Individuals can move up the ranks in their particular celebrity stratosphere, but they are not increasing their mainstream celebrity. Relative celebrity’s exchange rate with mainstream celebrity is horizontal: How interested the public is in one’s field of relative celebrity determines if being a luminary of academia, football, or Hollywood has any currency in the world at large. Some types of relative celebrity will simply never be interesting to the wider public. Jervis may reign supreme in Warhammer World, but it is unlikely that his relative celebrity will ever transfer to mainstream stardom, because the popular press and ordinary public will simply never be interested in miniatures battling in space forty thousand years in the future. Thus, no matter the reach of his celebrity in Warhammer World, Jervis’s relative-celebrity exchange rate with mainstream celebrity is roughly the same as Iceland’s krona with the U.S. dollar.
Conversely, some types of celebrity have an infallibly strong exchange rate with mainstream stardom. If you’re a star in Hollywood, you have an almost one-to-one exchange rate of also being a mainstream celebrity. The same holds true for American sports stars. Alex Rodriguez may lose his appeal at some point, but the handsome baseball star is an example of one of the quickest ascents from relative to mainstream celebrity. Baseball players who sign with major franchises almost instantly attain massive media coverage and a huge, diverse fan base interested in all aspects of their persona.32 Each type of relative celebrity has a different currency with mainstream: Professor Ferguson’s relative-celebrity exchange rate with mainstream celebrity may not be as strong as Angelina Jolie’s, but it is far and away more valuable than Jervis Johnson’s.
We know there are linkages among fame, celebrity, and talent. Some individuals have all three qualities, some possess one or two. We know that famous people (such as Bill Gates) are not necessarily celebrities. Relative celebrity is the converse of this phenomenon, where people who are truly celebrated in their relative worlds are not famous to the world at large. Fame is global, and most celebrity is local. Fame is fundamentally about sheer numbers of people who know one’s name, while celebrity emerges out of a collective interest in a particular person. Fame is measured by quantity of recognition. Celebrity does not imply that lots of people know about you but instead is indicated by a collective group of people (big or small in number) invested in knowing about you as a person.
Thus, the social phenomenon of celebrity exists everywhere, and people all over the place have at least the opportunity to become (relative) celebrities by cultivating an interested public. Celebrity can also be at once mainstream and relative. Celebrity is not only malleable and constantly in flux but also operates according to the same principles and emerges from the same conditions regardless of social standing. These unifying traits of celebrity explain why we see similarities in how the young high school football star, Jervis from Games Workshop, M with his three thousand–plus Facebook friends, and Angelina Jolie engage their relative publics, who care about them in similar ways. An analysis of celebrity, then, tells us the story of how people become leaders and stars in their own worlds and in the world at large through very similar mechanisms.