1. Celebrity Today
1. David Marshall makes a similar point in Celebrity and Power. He looks beyond Hollywood and shows that celebrity emerges in other social and cultural contexts.
2. For discussions of multipolarity in foreign affairs and international politics, see Mansfield, “Concentration, Polarity and the Distribution of Power,” and Haass, “The Age of Nonpolarity.”
3. Frith, Celeb Diaries.
4. See Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, and Robinson, “Economics of Fashion Demand,” for detailed discussion on elites and the masses.
5. Berridge, Madame Tussaud. Much of the discussion on Tussaud is informed by Berridge’s work.
6. I interviewed Mark Richards, former sculptor for Madame Tussaud’s, who was of great help in explaining the evolution of the wax museum from a small London shop to a worldwide franchise. When Richards worked at Tussaud’s in the late 1980s, there were seven sculptors who worked right above the shop. In the time he was working there, the wax museum became a massive brand, and as a result the wax studio moved out of the center of London to a huge complex. As Richards put it, “It wasn’t a shop anymore. It became a factory.”
7. David Marshall makes the point that celebrity journalists were writing about celebrities in such a way that they were becoming as known for “their ordinariness along with their extraordinariness” (“Intimately Intertwined,” p. 318).
8. In Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy argues that fame is essentially being talked about.
9. Gamson’s Claim to Fame is an excellent account of the old Hollywood studio system and how stars were controlled by studios rather than as independent agents of their own accord.
10. The writer Susan Sontag’s death prompted a similar documentation, though Sontag’s death was mourned in part because of her great intellectual contributions to the public dialogue and her extraordinary writing and creativity—a much different sentiment from that felt toward Goody.
11. John Reynolds, “OK! Achieves Bumper Sales with Jade’s Wedding Issues,” Media Week, March 17, 2009, www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/891089/OK-achieves-bumper-sales-Jades-wedding-issues/.
12. Magazine Publishers of America, an industry association for consumer magazines.
13. See, for example, Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, for a detailed account of the changing socioeconomic demographics of the workforce.
14. Data taken from U.S. Census Bureau. See Casper and Bianchi, Continuity and Change in the American Family; Amato et al., Alone Together.
15. Florida, Rise of the Creative Class.
16. As the sociologist Robert Putnam noted in his famous book Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), Americans no longer engage in civic and community associations that allow for social interaction and a sharing of collective experiences. David Marshall also discusses the way celebrity journalism acted as a means to fill the void, providing a “constellation of recognition” and “points of commonality” in an otherwise increasingly anonymous society (Celebrity and Power, p. 317).
17. To start with the first trend: In a day and age of globalization and placeless technology, we have evolved from small communities to large anonymous cities and suburbs. Of course this is nothing new. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, urban sociologists decried the rise of the city as a social organization that makes people alienated, lonely, and without any close social ties. On gemeinschaft and gesellschaft and their implications, see Tonnies, Community and Society, and Weber, Economy and Society.
18. McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears, “Social Isolation in America.” The General Social Survey is an in-person survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. From 1972 to 1994, the survey was conducted annually; since then it has been conducted biennially. Each year of the survey, approximately two thousand people are interviewed in forty states.
19. The changing social and economic landscape is marked by three definitive trends: the rise of a globalized, community-less society; the abundance of technology and media outlets to transmit rapid information; and the monetization of practically every element of society. For an extraordinarily detailed look at the changing social landscape, see Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, and Conley, Elsewhere U.S.A.
20. Jenkins, Convergence Culture.
21. Fox, “Evolution, Alienation and Gossip.”
22. Brown et al., “Social Closeness Increases Salivary Progesterone in Humans.”
23. This topic is discussed more explicitly in Steven Lukes’s Power. In his discussion of the “third dimension of power,” he argues that both overt and covert methods can be used to control the political and issue agendas. In this case, the dominance of celebrity news avoids a public dialogue over “real issues” such as health care, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, and so forth. Also see Bachrach and Baratz, “Two Faces of Power.” For a current angle on the use of celebrity to distract from political upheaval, see Jim Windolf, “The Obama-Salahi-Tiger-G.E.-Afghan Axis,” Vanity Fair, December 7, 2009.
24. Turner, Understanding Celebrity.
2. The Celebrity Residual: The Inexplicable Brew of Talent, Fame, and Celebrity
1. Celebritynetworth, www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/paris-hilton-net-worth/.
2. Lynn Hirschberg, “The Self-Manufacture of Megan Fox,” New York Times Magazine, November 15, 2009.
3. From media reports, it seems that Paris is no longer represented by Mintz but instead Michael Sitrick. Many media mentions of Hilton refer to “her spokesperson” or “her publicist” without elaborating on who this individual is. From the enormous number of articles written about Paris, it appears she has many publicists/spokespeople working for her including Mintz, Sitrick, Lori Zelenko, and manager Jamie Freed. See Laura Barton, “The Message Behind Paris’s ‘Demure’ New Look,” Guardian, June 28, 2007; Mike Sitrick and Doree Shafrir, “Paris Hilton’s New Best Friend,” Gawker.com, 2007; “What It Iz: Chris Brown Hires Paris Hilton’s Publicist,” Power953.com, February 18, 2009; “Paris Hilton Fiddles with Fairy Dust,” Just-Jared.com, November 30, 2008; IANS, “Paris Hilton to Sue New Zealand Company for Billboard Ad,” Entertainment Daily, November 9, 2009.
4. Page Six is considered the ultimate gossip column. It has been widely known to make or break careers and is followed relentlessly by the New York City, Los Angeles, and London media, tycoons, and celebrity set.
5. Irony of ironies is that Kathy had her own reality TV show that capitalized on Paris’s celebrity. The show tanked.
6. The residual is more traditionally used in statistics to explain the difference between the observed value of the dependent variable and the predicted value of the dependent variable based on the regression model. Quite simply, the residual is the difference between what we expect to observe and what we actually do observe. In the 1950s, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert M. Solow put forth the theory of the residual as being meaningful in his study of economic growth, where he suggested that it was not capital accumulation or increases in labor that explained growth but instead technological innovation, an almost impossible variable to measure (“Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39, no. 3 [1957]: 312–20). This finding became known as the Solow Residual. In my example here, stardom is the dependent variable. One might think talent or even “being known” are the obvious variables that predict star status, but many noncelebrities have both of these variables—some in even greater quantity than celebrities. Thus there are inexplicable variables other than those we think ought to predict celebrity status; these make up the celebrity residual.
7. For an empirical study of the difference between talent and talentless success, see Gergaud and Verardi, “Untalented but Successful.” Gergaud and Verardi looked at a Pokémon card game and studied the differences in outcome between those identified as talented and untalented. They found that these distinctions are not mutually exclusive, as we witness in real life where truly talented and merely celebrated stars cohabitate.
8. Gladwell, Outliers, discusses the interplay of multiple variables that have helped shape the success of Gates, among others.
9. Marian Burros, “Mrs. Obama Speaks Out About Her Household,” New York Times, March 20, 2009.
10. See Schweinberger et al., “Event-Related Brain Potential Evidence” David, “News Concreteness and Visual-Verbal Association” Hagtvedt and Patrick, “Art Infusion.”
11. See Cowen, What Price Fame? for a look at the same phenomenon with regard to brands and products. Cowen argues that celebrity endorsements are most effective when the product’s quality is hard to measure, which is why you get endorsements for hair spray but not hardware nails.
12. See Lewis, Moneyball, for an extraordinarily detailed and riveting account of how scouts and coaches misuse statistics.
13. Ibid., p. 34.
14. David Carr, “How Palin Became a Brand,” New York Times, April 5, 2010.
15. Ted Johnson, “Where Reality and DC Collide,” Politico, November 30, 2009, www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29974.html.
16. Caves, in Creative Industries, does an excellent job outlining the unique properties of the “creative industries”—fashion, art, music, design, film, and so forth. He argues that these industries operate in “uncertain markets” with a “nobody knows” property. In other words, the ability to gauge how good something is in these industries is impossible until the product hits the market. Even then, with the various ways a cultural good is evaluated, the critique is subjective. Similarly, see Faulkner and Anderson, “Short-Term Projects and Emergent Careers,” for an extensive study of Hollywood films and the directors and producers associated with them. They discovered that despite awards, there was no correlation between previous success (e.g., winning Oscars) and future success in producing films.
17. Joe Lewis, the British billionaire owner of ENIC International Ltd. and main investor in Tavistock Group, is a perfect example of this model. He is a generally reclusive man who now lives in the Bahamas, and the public’s knowledge of his personal life is just a brief sketch.
18. There are always exceptions, Nicola Horlick and Donald Trump, for example. Both, however, are more “celebrated” for their personal lives. In general, in finance, people are considered worth talking to in direct proportion to their number of successful deals. Successful asset managers are those who have an impressive performance track record. These observations have been deduced from my conversations with people who work in the industry.
19. Media hits were calculated through Google News.
20. See Forbes Celebrity 100 (2009) and Absolute Return + Alpha, “Top 25 Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers.” Earnings were calculated by “the managers’ shares of their firm’s performance and management fees, as well as gains on their own capital invested in their funds.”
21. Perhaps one of the clearest ways to measure celebrity is by looking at biographies. Biographies of course are not a laundry list of job titles and awards. A biography, by its very etymology, is the story of a person’s life. Of course, there wouldn’t be a market for them if we were not interested in others’ lives. Biographies wouldn’t make it to the top of the bestseller list if particular individuals weren’t celebrated more than others. So a very interesting way to capture where celebrity emerges is to look at who gets written about. Sure enough, merit-driven industries are less likely on the whole to have a preponderance of biographies. Barring the truly exceptional, most biographies are written about individuals in ambiguously measured industries. As the economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out in What Price Fame? there has been a massive transformation of biographies from being serious treatises on the life and times of people of obvious merit, such as philosophers or political leaders, to books on entertainment figures and those with spectacular personal lives. Cowen notes that in the early 1900s, 46 percent of all biographies published in the United States were of political leaders. By 1940, political biographies had declined to represent a quarter of all published. During this same time period, entertainment biographies increased from a 26 percent share to 55 percent in 1940. However, in this time period, more than three-quarters of these biographies were of serious, “high-art” entertainers. By 1940, only 9 percent of the entertainment biographies were of “serious people” making obviously merit-worthy contributions to society.
22. It should be noted that Buffett also owns a $4 million property in Laguna Beach, California, and a private jet he named The Indefensible. These are Buffett’s only extravagances and run against his public castigation of wild CEO expenditures. Forbes argues that the Laguna Beach house is worth less than a hundredth percentage point of his net worth. See “Homes of the Billionaires,” Forbes.com, March 28, 2009.
23. See Trump’s Never Give Up, The Art of the Deal, and How to Get Rich; Jeffery Slonim, “Donald Trump Shelters Jennifer Hudson,” People, November 11, 2008; Caris Davis, “Trump Wins at Wrestlemania, Keeps His Hair,” People, April 2, 2007; Todd Peterson, “Melania Trump: Giving Birth Was ‘Easy,’” People, April 6, 2006; K. C. Baker et al., “Donald Trump’s Wife Pregnant,” People, September 27, 2005; Stephen Silverman, “Trump’s Bride to Wear $100,000 Dior Gown,” People, January 18, 2005.
24. Google, “Year-End Zeitgeist: Top Searches in 2006.” Google Zeitgeist has aggregate data on search for 2004 onward. Complete methodology of the Zeitgeist data set is also available.
25. Based on an interview with a former OK! editor.
3. The Relative Celebrity (or, The Biggest Star You Never Heard Of)
1. Before getting into Games Workshop, the average reader is likely wondering what exactly are war gaming and role playing. The latter is somewhat self-explanatory (you take on a role of someone other than yourself in some fantasy scenario like Dungeons and Dragons), but war gaming is a craze worth further description. War games are essentially simulated military exercises set in particular eras, historical contexts, or environments both real and made up. While the U.S. Department of Defense actually enacts war games with great gravity in order to protect the country, there is an entire subculture of hobbyists who play war games purely for entertainment. The board game Risk is considered the first of such games. Not surprisingly, war games are a part of a larger role-playing genre that includes science fiction and fantasy subculture. But in the last several decades, war gaming has become a particularly unusual and all-encompassing hobby that has transcended its original categorization, becoming its own genre. Within this curious world of war gaming, the Games Workshop has become a pivotal player and in itself its own subculture.
2. Games Workshop offers a variety of fantasy battle situations from futuristic space wars to Lord of the Rings (which the company acquired rights to). The games involve collecting a large number of miniatures, each of which is endowed with specific skills, rights, and movements on the battlefield. The miniatures are unpainted pieces of steel and ceramic, and part of the game involves painting one’s own actors. In order to participate, one needs to have the rule book, special paint sets with correct colors, and the key models to begin playing. Of course, each game has its own particular models, paint, and rules. An enormous spray paint gun is also on offer for ease and efficiency in miniature preparation. In order to play Warhammer, one of the Workshop’s key games, a hobbyist must have Citadel miniatures, Dwarfs, Dwarf Thunderers, Dwarf Miners, Goblins of a great variety (Night Goblin Spearmen and Night Goblin Archers, among others), the rule book, and the requisite plastic scenery and paint. There are various military operations, goals, and situations that are game specific. While obviously these games can be played in the privacy of one’s home, due to the need for infrastructure and scenery, and the desire to find other people to play with, many of the games are played at Games Workshop events, including the world-famous Games Day held in Birmingham, a few hours north of London.
2. Sure, some relative celebrities end up becoming mainstream, but that’s rarely the point. Just ask Tron Guy. Jay Maynard, a computer programmer, went from geek to Internet celebrity when pictures of him in his luminescent costume inspired by the Disney science-fiction movie Tron showed up all over the Internet. Soon, Maynard ended up on Jimmy Kimmel Live and an episode of South Park, and was a headliner for the Internet celebrity conference ROFLCon. But all Tron Guy really wanted to do was saunter about Fairmont, Minnesota, in his special white one-piece suit.
3. There’s been a lot of talk about “microfame” in the media. But the assumption is always that “microfame” (particularly Internet stardom) is a stop on the road to becoming a mainstream “macro” celebrity. This argument misses the real point of these micro versions of stardom, which is that they exist in their own social and economic stratospheres.
4. Relative celebrity emerges through similar channels as other forms of clustering. Within the economic geography literature, scholars have noted that particular social and economic phenomena occur when a concentration of like-minded labor pools, industries, and resources locate, whether Detroit’s auto industry or Silicon Valley’s technology sector. For an analysis of this phenomenon in industrial clustering, see the original treatise, Marshall’s Principles of Economics. For a more contemporary analysis of clusters, see Porter, “Clusters and the Economics of Competition.” The small-world network phenomenon in the fields of mathematics, physics, and sociology demonstrates similar patterns to those found in relative-celebrity social groups. In small worlds, people within a network are not necessarily physically proximate but most can be reached by every other person within the network through a few small steps. While this phenomenon has been observed in wide sections of the population, it is particularly applicable to groups with common causes, or what the journalist William Finnegan has called affinity groups. See Watts and Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks” Watts, Small Worlds; and Finnegan, “Affinity Groups and the Movement Against Corporate Globalization.”
5. David Marshall makes the point that celebrities are “elevated individuals” who are revered by a particular audience. See Celebrity and Power.
6. Both Jeffrey Williams and David Marshall have noted the existence of celebrity outside the conventional Hollywood and political star systems. Both make the point that celebrities exist in autonomous and self-contained systems. See Marshall, Celebrity and Power, and Williams, “Academostars.”
7. Economists call this “barriers to entry.” When they look at markets, the ability to enter them is a function of “high” or “low” barriers. See Demsetz, “Barriers to Entry.”
8. Facebook researchers, for example, have pointed toward the ability of the social-networking site to allow people to “passively” be fed news about their friends. By simply trolling their news feed, members are able to collectively be updated on the extraneous aspects of their various five hundred–plus friends. Social media sites function less as networking conduits than as a means to cultivate public personae. As Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, put it, Facebook is “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances.” Sounds like what the New York Post does for Paris. See “Primates on Facebook,” Economist, February 26, 2009, and the Facebook researchers’ further explanation of member social behavior on the site, “Maintained Relationships on Facebook,” March 9, 2009, www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=55257228858. Other fascinating papers on user behavior are Burke, Marlow, and Lento, “Feed Me,” and Sun et al., “Gesundheit!”
9. Lorenzen and Täube, “Breakout from Bollywood?”
10. Box Office 2007, Box Office India.
11. In August 2009, Khan was detained and questioned in Newark Airport immigration. Immigration officials said it was a routine examination. See Harris, “Bollywood Star Detained at Newark Airport.”
12. Morning Edition, “His Name Is Khan (And It’s One You Might Know),” National Public Radio, February 11, 2010. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123589668.
13. Taken from Mark Lorenzen, “How the West Was Won.” Lorenzen’s work is some of the most in-depth and thoughtful analysis on Bollywood and provides fascinating facts and a very interesting assessment of Bollywood vis-à-vis the larger global cultural market.
14. Joe Leahy, “Ambani’s Indian Tiger Eyes Wounded MGM,” Financial Times, January 16, 2010.
15. Lorenzen, “How the West Was Won.”
16. “I Don’t Regret Turning Down Slumdog: SRK,” Times of India, January 20, 2009.
17. Joanna Walters, “Why Brits with Brains Are the Big Apple’s New Blonde,” Observer, July 6, 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/06/usa.joannawalters.
18. David Kirp, “How Much for That Professor?” New York Times, October 27, 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/opinion/27KIRP.html.
19. In “Academostars,” Jeremy Williams explains that the period after World War II brought intense government and foundation support to public and private universities. This funding enabled professors to generate individually run research projects. In turn, the standards and criteria set by the university changed from teaching to being primarily research driven. By the mid-1970s, the “academic star system” was in place, and professors began creating what Williams terms “individual professional reputations,” and this recognition was driven initially by their research. By the mid-1980s, academics were attaining mainstream profiles in the New York Times, which had begun to devote coverage to public intellectuals in profiles and news stories. In one such story, “The Tyranny of the Yale Critics” by Colin Campbell, the newspaper profiled the Yale literary stars with full-page photographs of Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Jacques Derrida, the latter captured “in a glam pose,” as Williams wrote. Today, some academic stars write features for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine (Spurgin, “The Times Magazine and Academic Megastars”). See also Shumway, “The Star System in Literary Studies.” For additional reading on the transformation of American universities, see Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, and David Kirp’s excellent book on “star wars” in academia, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line.
20. See Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line.
21. As Jeffrey Williams quotes cultural scholar and New York University professor Andrew Ross, “The phenomenon of academic celebrity in some respects is an extension of the genre of academic gossip, which has a culture unto itself—this extraordinary phenomenon whereby high-powered intellectuals spend a lot of their downtime trading scurrilous and detailed rumors about far-away colleagues” (“Academostars,” p. 372).
22. Katie Nicholl, Miles Goslett, and Caroline Graham, “The History Man and the Fatwa Girl: How Will David Cameron Take News That Think-Tank Guru Niall Ferguson Has Deserted Wife Sue Douglas for Somali Feminist?” Daily Mail, August 1, 2010, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249095/The-history-man-fatwa-girl-How-David-Cameron-news-think-tank-guru-Niall-Ferguson-deserted-wife-Sue-Douglas-Somali-feminist.html#ixzz0etDi4TFQ.
23. Maureen O’Conner, “Fabulously Snobby Divorce Scandal of the Week: Niall Ferguson’s Fatwa Mistress Two-Step,” Gawker.com, February 8, 2010, gawker.com/5466433/fabulously-snobby-divorce-scandal-of-the-week-niall-fergusons-fatwa-mistress-two+step?skyline=true&s=i. The British high society magazine Tatler ran a feature profile on Ferguson and Ali entitled “The Ascent of Love,” a clear reference to Ferguson’s bestselling book The Ascent of Money. The article was accompanied by a photo spread of the two looking glamorous and every bit the star couple.
24. Roubini, “Why Central Banks Should Burst Bubbles.”
25. Stephen Mihm, “Dr. Doom,” New York Times, August 15, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17pessimist-t.html.
26. Brian Moylan, “Please Help Give Armageddon-Loving Economist Dr. Doom a New Nickname,” Gawker.com, February 3, 2010, http://gawker.com/5463522/please-help-give-armageddon+loving-economist-dr-doom-a-new-nickname.
27. Richard Lawson, “A Russian Oligarch’s New Year’s Megaparty Starring Dr. Doom,” Gawker.com, January 6, 2010, http://gawker.com/5441734/a-russian-oligarchs-new-years-eve-megaparty-photo-album-starring-dr-doom/.
28. Gillian Tett, “Breakfast with the FT: Nouriel Roubini,” Financial Times, May 7, 2010.
29. Artists still have a media following in England and are mentioned regularly in the gossip blogs and splashed across the tabloid press.
30. For a fascinating account of the rise of Abstract Expressionist artists into mainstream culture (and a great history of the movement), see Perl, New Art City.
31. For an in-depth account of the New York pop and graffiti art scene, see Taylor, The Downtown Book.
32. See Smart, The Sport Star, for an in-depth discussion of the media’s increasing interest in major athletes’ personal lives. Smart argues that the media has created personal narratives around sports stars, thus generating a fan base not focused solely on sports statistics.
4. Inside the Star Machine: Celebrity as Industry
1. Matthew Garrahan, “Hollywood’s Golden Talent Agents,” Financial Times, February 19, 2010.
2. These numbers are taken from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics County Business Patterns (2008). These are number of establishments as reported to the BLS. Establishment numbers are useful for measuring sheer number of firms and businesses in the industry.
3. In order to isolate those occupations directly related to the celebrity industry, I looked at the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics (2008), which is a tabulation of employees by occupation (rather than just industry). I studied the data for the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). An MSA is defined as an urban area of at least fifty thousand people, a geographical area of a number of towns and counties and a larger central city. The counties and towns included in a particular MSA are determined by the census. Looking at the occupational data allows us to see the people engaging in work directly relating to the celebrity industry, not just the firms. For example, looking at occupations associated with the publishing industry will allow us to measure the number of publicists, agents, and other individual positions that deal directly with celebrities. Additionally, because so many entertainers are “freelance” and essentially work on contract rather than on retainer, their employment numbers are not often picked up in firm employee numbers.
4. As not all workers within the broadly defined support and prepping industries (e.g., fitness trainers, nutritionists, hairstylists, and so-forth) are working strictly for celebrities, I took a percentage of the overall prep and support industries. I computed this number by incorporating Richard Florida’s methodology for approximating the “creative class,” or those members of the workforce who “generate meaningful new forms.” Florida makes the point that members of the creative class depend on multiple service workers to support them. I extend this argument to include the identified “support” industries and occupations more generally that work within the celebrity economy. I computed the percentage of the creative class comprised of celebrity-driven occupations. In Los Angeles the figure is 1.9 percent (34,800 workers) and in New York 0.04 percent (12,020 workers) of all “creative” workers (1,878,400 and 2,923,280, respectively). I then multiplied these percents by the total number of support and prep workers in each city to attain an approximation of the number of workers in these broader industrial categories devoted to the celebrity industry. It is impossible to get an exact figure, but this methodology provides a proxy to measure the impact of the celebrity industry on these cities’ economies. My result is a very conservative estimate. I suspect many more work with celebrities and aspiring stars. See Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, pp. 72–77, for an explanation of this methodological approach.
5. Duff McDonald, “The Britney Economy,” Portfolio, January 14, 2008.
6. Nicole LaPorte, “Crash of the Stalker Press,” Daily Beast, November 16, 2009.
7. While celebrities seem like an isolated and limited number of individuals, an analysis of the industrial and occupational structure of the industry demonstrates that it is an important economic cluster to those metros in which it is located. Despite cities and policy makers who dismiss celebrities (and the arts more generally) as inconsequential to the economy, it’s clear they’re a formidable force in workforce and establishment numbers and payroll. See Alliance for the Arts, “Cultural Capital,” 2002; Ann Markusen and Greg Schrock’s “The Artistic Dividend” and Currid, The Warhol Economy, for a more detailed discussion as it relates to the artistic and cultural industries more generally.
8. There has been a similar discussion of the importance of clustering in regard to Silicon Valley’s technology industry. See Saxenian, Regional Advantage, and Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley.
9. See Rein et al., High Visibility, for similar celebrity industry classifications. In what the authors call the “structure of the celebrity industry,” this book outlines very similar industrial categories: the entertainment industry, communications industry, publicity industry, representation industry, appearance industry, and coaching industry. Turner’s Understanding Celebrity also details industries that comprise “the economy of celebrity,” paying particular attention to agents, publicists, and public relations more generally. Josh Gamson’s Claims to Fame examines the importance of those individuals who commercialize celebrities. As you can see, there are nuances in how to construct the celebrity industries, but generally speaking, scholars who have studied this topic are by and large in agreement on the basic components.
10. Occupational Employment Statistics, Bureau of Labor 2007. See Appendix A for a complete list of occupational codes used for this analysis.
11. A location quotient (LQ) is the measure of the concentration of a particular industry or occupation in a designated area compared to a larger geography. In this case, Los Angeles and New York, respectively, are measured compared to the average concentration of these occupations in other metro areas. The equation used to compute these figures is: LQ = (OR/TER)/(ON/TEN), where OR is regional occupational employment, TER is total regional employment, ON is national occupational employment, and TEN is total national employment.
12. McLuhan, Understanding Media and The Medium Is the Massage; Boorstin, The Image.
13. Gamson, Claims to Fame; Turner, “The Mass Production of Celebrity.”
14. Gamson, Claims to Fame.
15. See Seipp, “The Puppet Masters,” for a detailed and illuminating account of the control of the Hollywood publicity machine.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. The write-around enables reporters to profile someone by talking to everyone around him or her, even if the writer never gets the interview with the star. The famous example of the write-around is “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Gay Talese was assigned to write an article on Frank Sinatra for Esquire, but he could not get access to the singer and thus had to observe from a close distance Sinatra’s comings and goings and general disposition. Through observation and talking to people in Sinatra’s cohort, Talese was able to write the story, which has been hailed as one of the finest pieces of journalism ever written. Esquire has said it’s the best story ever published in the magazine.
19. David Marshall remarks that journalism has created a new type of celebrity reportage, through which the celebrities’ personalities (whether athletes or Hollywood starlets) are key elements to the story lin (Marshall, “Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way”).
20. Maureen Callahan, “Hot Shots,” New York Post, February 7, 2010.
21. David Samuels’s fascinating article, “Shooting Britney,” Atlantic, April 2008, provides in-depth figures and details on X17’s revenue and staff, along with some very insightful analysis of the paparazzi business in Los Angeles. See also David Carr, “101 Secrets (and 9 Lives) of a Magazine Star,” New York Times, June 29, 2008.
22. Samuels, “Shooting Britney.”
23. Callahan, “Hot Shots.”
24. Brandon Gray, “‘New Moon’ Shatters Opening Day Record,” Box Office Mojo, November 21, 2009.
25. These numbers were computed using the location quotient method, as discussed above.
26. Richard Simpson, “The Hairstyle That Cost Jennifer Aniston £40,000,” Daily Mail, March 4, 2009.
27. Jonathan Morgan, “Jennifer Aniston Spends $20,000 a Month on Her Beauty Routine,” Stylelist, www.stylelist.com/2008/07/17/jennifer-aniston-spends-20-000-a-month-on-her-beauty-routine/.
28. “Jennifer Aniston Buys Two Tanning Beds,” Star, September 30, 2008, www.starmagazine.com/jennifer_aniston_tanning_beds/news/14669.
29. Robin Pogrebin, “Workout Trainer of Madonna Will Open New York Studio,” New York Times, February 6, 2009.
30. Susan Yara, “Personalizing Your Workout,” Forbes, March 21, 2006, www.forbes.com/2006/03/20/workout-fitness-gyms-cx_sy_0321htow _ls.html.
31. I called both Equinox West Hollywood and Yogaworks in Los Angeles.
32. Howard Breuer, “Britney’s Lawyers Question K-Fed’s Spending,” People, March 10, 2008.
33. Liz Jones, “Why Has Victoria Beckham Blown Over £2 million on 100 Virtually Identical Birkin Bags?” Daily Mail, May 22, 2009.
34. Average income is based on 2007 U.S. Census estimates: $50,223.
35. Ken Tucker, “Minority Report: In Defense of Tom Cruise,” New York, June 5, 2005.
36. Garrahan, “Hollywood’s Golden Talent Agents.”
37. Lorenzen and Täube, “Breakout from Bollywood?”
38. Neil Midgley, “Simon Cowell: A Conqueror, but for How Long?” Daily Telegraph, December 12, 2009.
39. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, “Rage Against the Wrong Machine,” Financial Times, December 20, 2009, p. 11.
5. How to Become a Star: The Celebrity Network
1. In social network analysis, “clique” describes a group of closely networked individuals (e.g., “strong ties”) who express very similar opinions, behaviors, etc., exhibiting what social network analysts call “homophily.” See Kossinets and Watts, “Origins of Homophily.”
2. For a terrific overview of the social network analysis literature, see Marin and Wellman, “Social Network Analysis.”
3. My book The Warhol Economy discusses how social networks facilitate important economic outcomes in the creative industries: getting a job, meeting top art dealers, etc. Saxenian’s Regional Advantage discusses very similar mechanisms within the social networks of Silicon Valley’s technology industry.
4. Obviously, to study celebrity social networks with any rigor, Gilad and I had to figure out a systematic way of collecting and cataloging all the people and events associated with celebrity, and there are thousands and thousands of each. As it turns out, some photographic agencies had already done this and we just picked the best. Getty Images not only has millions of photographs but also catalogs them by topic, event, date, people in photos, and so forth. Gilad and I conducted an experiment to see if we could make sense of celebrity through studying the photographs of the events celebrities go to and the people they hang out with. We collected the caption information on all the photos taken by Getty photographers of arts and entertainment events and people for one year. We studied approximately 600,000 photos of almost 12,000 events with 66,100 people in these photos at 128 places around the world. Of course not all 66,100 people in the photographs are celebrities, and sometimes noncelebrities end up at celebrity events. In order to account for these cases, we isolated those individuals photographed at least four times. By doing this, we captured 6.5 percent of all individuals in the Getty Images database, the celebrity core. We then studied all the events they attended, people they spent time with, and cities around the world they traveled to in attending those events.
5. Our method was multistep. Step one collected meta-information from the pictures in the Getty database. We then stored the meta-information in a MS-SQL relational database. In step two we identified the individuals in each photo. Instead of studying the photos themselves, we studied the caption information associated with the photos and cataloged an aggregate collection of this data. In order to identify the photographed objects, we used natural language processing (NLP). SQL-implemented association rules enabled us to clean the data. Our cataloging process collected the following information: names and occupations of individuals in each picture, the event and date when the photo was taken (e.g., Actress Angelina Jolie at the Oscars, February 22, 2007). In step three we used the database information to build a list of events and the celebrities photographed at them. From this list we built a two-mode network that connects people to events. The nodes are people and events they connect to through an undirected edge. A person is connected to an event if he or she is photographed at the event. In step four we converted the two-modes network to a one-mode network of co-attendance. In this new network, the nodes are people, and two nodes are connected by an undirected edge if they are photographed at the same event. The edge value equals the number of events they are both photographed at. We isolated those individuals who were photographed at four or more events. We also built a one-mode network of events where the nodes are events and two events are connected with an undirected edge if at least one individual attends both events. The edge value equals the number of people who attended both events. Several programs and tools were used to conduct this research, including the data-mining tool SPPS Clementine (to identify groups in the network). Social network analysis tools Pajek and Netminer were used for the SNA analysis.
6. In studies done in the 1960s, the sociologist Stanley Milgram found that most people around the world are connected by 6 degrees, in itself a fascinating study of how linked human society is despite seeming chaotic. Since then, scholars have found the same median connections looking at different populations (the result ranges from 5 to 7, so although 6 is an average result, it is a fairly accurate quantitative representation of the phenomenon). By this theory, I could connect to a fisherman in Japan through six people: This finding has become known as the “small-world phenomenon,” or “six degrees of separation” in common parlance. Another study looking at linkages between film stars found that actors tend to be separated by only 4 degrees. See Stanley Milgram, “The Small-World Problem,” Psychology Today 1, no. 1 (May 1967): 61–67; Watts, Small Worlds; Watts and Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks; Goel, Muhamad, and Watts, “Social Search in ‘Small-World’ Experiments.” Since the late 1990s, social scientists have been studying the average connectedness of people around the world. There have been multiple experiments and studies undertaken using e-mail, letters, and social media sites. While some results point toward a median of 5.5 and others may report 7 connections, on the whole the average is about 6.
7. Overall, the Getty Images photographic network exhibits the characteristics of a small-world network and properties of a scale-free network (see Appendix B). Scale-free networks possess power law distribution connections between actors as compared to random-network connections. Most people photographed in the Getty database (95 percent) are connected to fewer than five other people, but our “celebrity core” (the 6.5 percent of individuals photographed four or more times) tend to be very connected (possessing greater than 5 degrees). Average distance, or characteristic path length (CPL), of the entire network is 3.26, while the average diameter in other observed social small worlds is 6. While Getty Images does document many culture industry events, individuals’ connections are not necessarily industry linked. General results do not produce linkages between nodes by industry (as defined by an individual’s industry affiliation and events attended).
8. Rytina and Morgan, “The Arithmetic of Social Relations.”
9. Social network analysts use the term “clustering coefficient” to measure the degree to which people are closely connected.
10. See Barabási, Linked.
11. Weinberg, “In Health-Care Reform, the 20–80 Solution.”
12. Gladwell, The Tipping Point; Pareto, “Manual of Political Economy” Reed, “The Pareto, Zipf and Other Power Laws.”
13. Barabási and Albert, “Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks.” For a more reader-friendly version of the phenomenon, see Barabási, Linked. In social network analysis, this network structure is called a “scale free network.” Such a network is present if the nodes’ degree frequency distributes according to the power distribution.
14. Metcalfe’s law is a way to observe the increased benefits obtained as more people engage in the network. See Gilder, Telecosm. Reed’s law also looks at the exponential benefits to social networks. David Reed argues that Robert Metcalfe does not fully capture the extent to which additional members of a social network produce exponential connections to members (Reed, “The Law of the Pack”).
15. Social network analysts more formally call this the difference between an individual’s positions in a network and cause for his or her participation in some network and position in that network.
16. In pure numbers, A-listers have an average of 3 connections to each other (remember we’re just looking at connections among the top twenty, not the entire Getty network), while B-listers have 0.65 and the bottom rung have just 0.5 connections—that’s less than 1 full connection to at least one other person for the middle and bottom twenty actors.
17. Currid, The Warhol Economy, p. 79.
18. See Oppenheimer, Front Row: Anna Wintour.
19. Ibid.
20. Social network analysts call the study of a particular individual’s network structure and the connections within his or her network an egocentric analysis. See, for example, Marsden, “Core Discussions Networks of Americans.”
21. See Fortini, “Twisted Sisters,” Larocca, “Two Stylish,” and The September Issue.
22. Boundary spanners can also exhibit the network property of “betweenness centrality” when they are an important point of connection along the shortest path between two groups of people or two nodes (people). When a node exhibits betweenness centrality he or she is very powerful within the network because he or she controls information and communication between two groups or people. Not all boundary spanners exhibit betweenness centrality and vice versa.
6. Whatever You Do, Don’t Go to Vegas: The Geography of Stardom
1. Hubler, “The Secret Life of Cory Kennedy.”
2. The “thirty-mile zone” (TMZ) refers to the “studio zone” for the film industry and includes the area in a thirty-mile radius expanding outward from the intersection of North La Cienega and West Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. This zone includes all the major studios (except MGM, which is out of the zone). The zone is also used to determine wages for entertainment workers who are union members. The popular celebrity website TMZ.com derived its name from the industry’s geographical initials.
3. GIS is a breakthrough for social science research. It is a technological system of associating statistical data (census, real estate values, etc.) with spatial locations (city, census tract, zip code area). GIS produces maps that show concentrations of statistical data in particular places and allows researchers to perform statistical analysis on the correlations between place and social and economic data. GIS analyzes how statistical variables increase and decrease across zip code, county, city, and so forth.
4. For the complete study, with a more technical analysis and more statistical results, see Currid and Williams, “The Geography of Buzz.”
5. Lynne Zucker and Michael Darby found the same thing in their study “Star Scientists”: “Where and when star scientists were actively producing publications is a key predictor of where and when commercial firms began to use biotechnology.” Their point, which can also be applied here, is that concentration of the stars within an industry produces real implications for economic growth when innovation occurs. In the case of London, New York, and Los Angeles, these cities economically and socially benefit from concentrations of stars through the revenue generated from their productivity and products.
6. For a discussion of endogeneity (and its associated problems) in statistical analysis, see Bound, Jaeger, and Baker, “Problems with Instrumental Variables Estimation.” For an interesting discussion of the role of endogeneity in economic growth and the positive impacts of generating human capital and knowledge, see Romer, “Endogenous Technical Change.”
7. It’s worth noting that Bollywood shows up with very little frequency in the database. Just 12 events and 197 people are recorded at events in India. In fact, the industry’s most celebrated star, Shahrukh Khan, appears in none of Getty’s photos. One explanation is that Getty generally documents more Western (primarily European and U.S.) events. Another explanation is that Bollywood is a very insular geography of stardom. As discussed in chapter 3, Bollywood is not interested in being a part of Hollywood and has no need for a Western audience (besides the Indian diasporas) and thus may not court Western media. Similarly, there may be less of a demand for images of Bollywood due to the fact that it remains introverted vis-à-vis other global celebrities and celebrity hubs. The rise of Nollywood (Nigeria’s film industry) has prompted another examination of the global filmmaking business. Nollywood does not generate the revenue that Hollywood does, but in sheer numbers it is making more films per year than both Bollywood and Hollywood. See Arsenault and Castells, “The Structure and Dynamics of Global Multi-Media Business Networks.”
8. We studied the relationship between a celebrity’s ranking and his or her geographical traveling patterns, or where he or she spent time. We wanted to see if there were patterns between level of celebrity success (media mentions or perceived talent by Hollywood) and geographical movements or attendance at particular events. Our analysis is based on data from the Getty Images photographic database. The collection methods are similar to those discussed in chapter 4 with regard to the social network analysis. We collected photograph caption data for an entire year and cataloged this caption information from all photos in Getty’s arts and entertainment category. From this data we identified the top ten photographed locations: New York (NY), Nevada (NV), Australia (AUS), Great Britain (GBR), France (FRA), Florida (FL), Germany (DEU), California (CA), Japan (JPN), and “Other.” We calculated the number of events photographed in each location and the number of times people were photographed in any other place before they attended an event in one of the aforementioned places of interest. We can interpret the movement from one place to another as a theoretical “flight” one needed to take to go from place A to place B. These variables were designated the following codes, which can be seen in the regression model outputs in Appendix C: Suffix s indicates that a star had to travel to make an appearance in one location (e.g., NYs), a variable with suffix h indicates total number of events one attended in one place during our studied period (e.g., NYh). For key locations NY, CA, NV, and GBR, almost all events studied were in New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and London. Thus our discussion is about these cities rather than the states or countries as a whole. In order to build a celebrity success model, we used two criteria of success: talent and media profile. For the talent proxy, we used Forbes’s Star Currency. Media mentions in that period were measured through Google news and blog search results. These results were obtained by carefully searching for the particular person in returned results. This automatic task was done by a specially designed Perl web bot. After collecting our data and creating our variables, we undertook statistical analysis. We used a linear multivariate regression model with the various identified places as independent variables and Star Currency and Google media volume as dependent variables. We chose the backward selection method of regression analysis in order to minimize the model such that it reported on only the most influential places impacting Star Currency and media volume. We used the SPSS statistical package for this analysis.
9. Preston, “A Dozen Reasons to Be Cheerful About the State of the British Media.”
10. There is a wide literature in economics and geography studying the ways places attain competitive advantage in particular industries. Initially most geographical advantages could be explained by natural resources, whether timber or iron ore, and being near a transportation hub. Postindustrial advantages are widely explained as possessing an educated labor force and company headquarters, particularly where innovative activity occurs. Many scholars have pointed to the importance of initial events and historical accidents that set competitive advantage in motion (what Arthur has called the “founder effect”). These initial events generate increasing returns that enable one place, one technology, or one individual to dominate the market and capture most of its benefits. See Arthur, Ermoliev, and Kaniovski, “Path-Dependent Processes” Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence; Arthur, “Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns” Arthur, “‘Silicon Valley’ Locational Clusters” Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY” Glaeser, “Urban Colossus” Glaeser and Saiz, “The Rise of the Skilled City” Lucas, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development.”
11. Concentration of human capital is a central explanation for productivity and regional and urban development. Although I am discussing a particular form of human capital, the wider point is that industrial success is predicated on having a critical concentration of the necessary labor force within that industry. See Lucas, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development” and Florida, Rise of the Creative Class.
12. See Graeme Turner’s excellent discussion of the role of the media in the production of celebrity in Understanding Celebrity. Also see Turner, “Celebrity, the Tabloid and the Democratic Public Sphere.” David Marshall has also written extensively about the relationship between celebrity and the media in “New Media—New Self” and “Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way.”
13. History indicates that art markets tend to flourish in financial capitals because surplus disposable income and patronage are necessary. From Holland’s golden age of painting in the seventeenth century to New York’s and London’s current overinflated art markets, abundant disposable income has been necessary to keep a robust art market booming. See, for example, Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches; Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, p. 3; and Goetzmann, “Accounting for Taste: Art and the Financial Markets Over Three Centuries.”
14. Economists and economic geographers call this process “path dependency”: The future is always limited by the previous set of actions and events, even if what happened before seems irrelevant to the current context. In some cases, path dependency leads to cumulative advantage whereby one place attains advantage over others in producing a particular product or becomes the world headquarters for an industry. This phenomenon is clear in London’s and New York’s dominance in finance, Pittsburgh’s historical advantage in steel manufacturing, and so forth. Thus the series of events and decisions made by policy makers, planners, or business developers caused these cities to become the central node of industrial activity. A similar process occurs with products. Microsoft is not seen as the “best” operating system (Linux is widely viewed as superior by computer scientists), but enough people use it that using any other operating system would be less efficient. At some point, it becomes irrelevant whether the location (or innovation) is in fact the superior version if it has locked in its dominant position by virtue of network externalities and critical mass of resources. For more on this process, see Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy; and David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY.” For an example of this process in popular culture, see Watts, “Is Justin Timberlake the Product of Cumulative Advantage?”
15. Boorstin, The Image. Also see the following cultural critics’ dissections of how popular culture is created and the way the media constructs events and people to be interested in: Adorno, The Culture Industry; Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
16. Hollywood’s construction in popular culture is essentially a simulacrum, or a referenced place, more symbolic than real. Hollywood is constructed for the public in a way that does not exist as such in real life. Both Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, and Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, consider the role of the simulacra and simulacrum in constructions of places and events and the relationship between symbols and reality.
7. The Economics of the Celebrity Residual
1. MonkDogz Art blog, “Where’s Bubbles? Jeff Koons May Know,” June 29, 2009, http://artblahblah.com/?tag=jeff-koons.
2. Sarah Thorton, “The Recipe for a Record Price: Auction House Price, Media Frenzy and Billionaire Buyers,” Art Newspaper, May 2008, www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=8471.
3. Mark Stevens, “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” New Republic, January 20, 1992. Michael Kimmelman, “Jeff Koons,” New York Times, November 29, 1991, www.nytimes.com/1991/11/29/arts/art-in-review-233491.html?scp=3&sq=jeff%20koons%20kimmelman%201991&st=cse.
4. Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook (New York: Rizzoli, 1993).
5. Arifa Akbar, “Koons Is Most Expensive Living Artist at Auction,” Independent, November 16, 2007, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/koons-is-most-expensive-living-artist-at-auction-400580.html.
6. For a review of the literature on the changing function of the media on celebrity culture, see Barry, “Celebrity, Culture Production and Public Life.”
7. Akbar, “Koons Is Most Expensive Living Artist.”
8. For an in-depth account of how art markets revolve around reputation, connections, and the media, see Anthony Haden-Guest, True Colors, and Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark.
9. Galenson, “Who Are the Greatest Living Artists?” and Galenson, Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art.
10. Carol Vogel, “Swimming with Famous Dead Sharks,” New York Times, October 1, 2006.
11. Richard Brooks, “Hirst’s Shark Is Sold to America,” Sunday Times, January 16, 2005; Serena Davies, “Why Painting Is Back in the Frame,” Daily Telegraph, January 8, 2005.
12. Landon Thomas Jr. and Carol Vogel, “A New Prince of Wall Street Uses His Riches to Buy Art,” New York Times, March 3, 2005.
13. Ciar Byrne, “Hirst’s Glittering Price Tag Loses None of Its Shine,” Independent, August 31, 2007, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/hirsts-glittering-price-tag-loses-none-of-its-shine-463675.html.
14. Richard Dorment, “For the Love of Art and Money,” Daily Telegraph, June 1, 2007.
15. Stallabrass, High Art Lite.
16. See Galenson, “You Cannot Be Serious,” a very interesting paper on the relationship between the artist’s persona and his or her work. Galenson argues that creating ambiguity around why artists create particular works catalyzes debates about their work that enables them both to advance their careers and be viewed as innovators in the art world.
17. DiMaggio, “Classification in Art.”
18. Haden-Guest, True Colors, p. 151.
19. Galenson’s research shows that Richter is the number one artist whose artwork consistently sells for over $1 million. He does not, however, reach the auction price heights of Hirst or Koons. So while Richter will certainly be considered one of the greatest artists of his time, he is not a celebrity who reaps the rewards of the winner-takes-all market. Richter’s work is revered by those who know art, the way a Booker Prize winner is lauded by book readers while the masses read Katie Price’s latest biography. As Galenson remarks, “Richter has a massive influence on young artists, even if not a household name.”
20. “Postwar & Contemporary Art at Christie’s Totals $430.8 Million,” editorial, Antiques and the Arts, May 20, 2008, antiquesandthearts.com/Antiques/AuctionWatch/
2008-05-20__13-38-28.html.
21. Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars.”
22. Frank and Cook, Winner-Take-All Society. Krueger, “The Economics of Real Superstars.” The effects have also been found in empirical studies of sports. See Lucifora and Simmons, “Superstar Effects in Sports,” and Nüesch, “The Economics of Superstars and Celebrities,” chapter 2.
23. DiMaggio, “Classification in Art.”
24. Elberse, “Should You Invest in the Long Tail?”
25. See Adler, “Stardom and Talent.” Adler argues that increasing numbers of people consuming the same product generates greater consumption capital, which makes the product more valuable. A rock concert, after all, is more powerful when the stadium is full and people are engaging in a shared experience.
26. Leibenstein, “Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen Effects in the Theory of Consumers’ Demand.”
27. For an empirical study of how people make cultural consumer choices, see Salganik, Dodds, and Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market” and Watts, “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?”
28. Peter Aspden, “Past Masters Beckon for the Followers of Modernity,” Financial Times, October 17, 2009. See Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, for a very thoughtful and exciting look into art economics.
29. Aspden, “Hirst Provides Study in Art of Business,” Financial Times, October 31, 2009; letters in response to article, “Damien Hirst Belongs in Art Market History,” November 7, 2009.
30. See Charles Kurzman et al., “Celebrity Status,” Sociological Theory 25 (2007): 4, for discussion of celebrity status and the social and economic privilege associated with it.
31. The program can be seen on YouTube, “Tracey Emin on the Loose,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNr2LOkXYE.
32. “Saatchi and Emin Make Up as He Buys Her Unmade Bed for £150K,” Independent, July 16, 2000, www.independent.co.uk/news/media/saatchi-and-emin-make-up-as-he-buys-her-unmade-bed-for-pound150k-707429.html.
33. Nigel Reynolds, “Charles Saatchi Could Have Bought Four Davids for the Price of Tracey Emin’s Bed,” Telegraph, January 7, 2006.
34. This observation comes out of a very helpful conversation with the University of Chicago economist David Galenson. Also see Stallabrass, High Art Lite.
35. Forbes.com, “The World’s Best-Paid Athletes,” June 24, 2004, www.forbes.com/2004/06/23/04athletesland.html.
36. CNN.com, “Beckham Signs ‘$250 Million’ Deal with LA Galaxy,” January 11, 2007, http://edition.cnn.com/2007/SPORT/football/01/11/beckham/index.html.
37. Grant Wahl, “David Beckham Could Walk Away from Galaxy After 2009 Season,” Sports Illustrated/CNN, November 3, 2008, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/grant_wahl
/11/03/wahl.beckham/index.html; Adam Scime, “David Beckham’s $46 Million Deal Makes Him World’s Highest-Paid Soccer Player,” Sports Illustrated, March 30, 2009, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/soccer/03/30/
beckham.salary/index.html.
38. Scime, “David Beckham’s $46 Million Deal.”
39. Lawson et al., “Vend It Like Beckham.”
40. See Smart, The Sport Star.
41. I benefited greatly from talking to FT sports columnist Simon Kuper about the Beckham phenomenon.
42. His real bump in salary was when he signed a ten-year contract in 2000 with the Texas Rangers for $252 million, which at the time was the greatest paying contract in baseball’s history by $63 million.
43. John Schlegel and Rhett Bollinger, “Jeter’s Feat Recognized Around MLB: Players, Coaches Respect What Shortstop Has Done for Game,” MLB.com, September 12, 2009, http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090909&content_id=6882850&vkey=news_nyy
&fext=.jsp&c_id=nyy.
44. It will be very interesting to see what happens when Jeter becomes a free agent. He is signed through 2010. If he is playing spectacularly then, he may sign an astronomical deal, comparable to A-Rod’s.
45. There is a literature of “sports economics” that argues that the marginally more talented ballplayer is worthy of a disproportionately higher salary than everyone else he is just a little bit better than. Not coincidentally, the term used by economists to describe this is “the superstar effect.” See Claudio Lucifora and Rob Simmons, “Superstar Effects in Sport,” Journal of Sports Economics 4, no. 1 (2003): 35. For more on the link between spectator draw, media attention, and athlete’s reward, see Egon Franck and Stephan Nüesch, “Talent, Past Consumption and/or Popularity—Are German Soccer Celebrities Rosen or Adler Stars?” Institute for Strategy and Business Economics, University of Zürich (working paper), 2006.
46. In 2004, the Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox in the ALCS. They became the first team in MLB’s history, and only the third team in North American professional sports history, to lose a best-of-seven series after taking a 3–0 series lead.
47. Tyler Kepner, “Rodriguez Is at Ease with Himself and October,” New York Times, October 18, 2009.
48. Lena Williams and Richard Sandomir, “Baseball; Rodriguez T-Shirts a Hot Item,” New York Times, February 18, 2004.
49. Vince Gennaro, “A-Rod’s Dollars Make Sense for Yankees,” Yahoo! Sports, November 27, 2007.
50. I used Google Insights, an innovative program in Google Labs, to conduct a time series analysis of search interest in various athletes vis-à-vis news mentions and topics associated with news items. Methodology on their datasets can be found at Insights. Numbers given are not absolute but normalized and scaled. The data is scaled from 0 to 100 with each point on the scale being divided by the highest point (100). The data is normalized, which means that the Google researchers divide the data sets by a common variable to cancel out any effect each individual variable might have on the data. By normalizing the data, the underlying features of the datasets become comparable. As they put it, “If we didn’t normalize the results and displayed the absolute rankings instead, data from regions generating the most search volume would always be ranked high.”
51. Some argue that sports stars get paid what they’re worth. See Simon Kuper, “Sport Can Teach Bankers Fair Play on Pay,” Financial Times, February 27, 2009.
52. See Smart, The Sport Star, for a discussion of Michael Jordan’s impact on the various entities that have benefited from his celebrity, from Nike to Jordan the brand.
53. It is remarkably difficult to obtain accurate salary and endorsement figures. I have benefited from very in-depth conversations with Forbes researchers and looking at archives in Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Forbes. That said, many of the numbers used are approximations, as this information is rarely given out.
54. US Weekly and People archive search results.
55. One film executive explained that 2010 could potentially determine Aniston’s star power at the box office, as she is in two major films: The Bounty Hunter (with Gerard Butler) and The Baster (with Jason Bateman). As he put it, “If both of those movies exceed $100 million, she’s a star. If they make less than $40 million, she’ll likely be consigned to playing second fiddle to male movie stars. Certainly there are worse positions to be in careerwise, but I’m sure Aniston wants to get into that Jolie, Bullock, Streep (and to a lesser extent Witherspoon) zone where people build movies around her and expect to make bank.”
56. Recently Forbes studied the most “overpaid” actors and found that Will Ferrell makes his studio just $3.29 per dollar he is paid. Consider Ferrell versus Shia LaBeouf, who brings in $160 per dollar he makes. As you can see, the residual is a fairly hard quality to put a concrete value on (http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/forbes-most-overpaid-stars.html).
57. Elberse, “The Power of Stars.”
58. De Vany and Walls, “Motion Picture Profit, the Stable Paretian Hypothesis, and the Curse of the Superstar.” See also Khurana, “The Curse of the Superstar CEO.”
59. See Howard Becker’s extraordinary book Art Worlds, which details the “conventions” of establishing good art. Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production and Distinction and Richard Caves’s Creative Industries are also very useful texts in understanding how to create value and merit in a seemingly subjective world.
60. Endogenous and exogenous models first emerged in macroeconomic theory to explain economic growth as a function of human capital and technology (Paul Romer’s endogenous or “new growth theory”). In other words, growth exhibiting increasing returns emerges when variables can continue to create new forms of growth and development. Human beings share ideas, which promotes new inventions; new technology tends to build upon itself. But the establishment of such growth emerges from within a confined area (defined by industry or geography, for example). Prior to such a model, economic growth was explained by savings or technological progress à la the Solow model. Exogenous change is that which changes a variable from the outside. For example, supply and demand of a particular genre of music can be explained by the changes (or consistency) of consumer taste. Mainstream celebrity fits this criterion quite well in that those individuals who transcend their relative celebrity (explained endogenously by those within the system) are a product of exogenous influences, particularly consumer tastes for certain types of celebrity, a topic I address in the next section of the book.
61. Matthew Mosk, “Sarah Palin Has Earned an Estimated $12 Million Since July,” ABC News, April 13, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/sarah-palin-earned-estimated-12-million-july/story?id=10352437.
62. I benefited tremendously from the fascinating and detailed article by Dan Wetzel, “For Nike, Jordan Delivered the Goods and More,” Yahoo! Sports, September 8, 2009. This article gives a great account of Nike’s gamble on Jordan and how, in turn, he transformed the sports company. http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=dw-jordannike090709&prov=yhoo&type=lgns.
63. Ibid.
64. “Michael Jordan Becomes Highest Paid NBA Player, with One-Year Bulls Contract Worth $25–30 million,” Jet, July 29, 1996.
65. Darren Rovell, “Swoosh! Inside Nike: Michael Jordan Continues to Score Points for Football Giant,” MSNBC: Business, February 12, 2008.
66. Roy S. Johnson, “The Jordan Effect: The World’s Greatest Basketball Player Is Also One of Its Great Brands. What Is His Impact on the Economy?” CNN Money, June 22, 1998.
67. Dan Wetzel, “For Nike, Jordan Delivered the Goods and More,” Yahoo! Sports, September 8, 2009.
68. For research on celebrity endorsers, see Erdogan, Baker, and Tagg, “Selecting Celebrity Endorsers.”
69. Mathur, Mathur, and Rangan, “The Wealth Effects Associated with a Celebrity Endorser: The Michael Jordan Phenomenon.”
70. Ibid.
71. Johnson, “The Jordan Effect.” For an updated account, see Roy Johnson, “Jordan (Still) Rules,” Sports Illustrated, April 10, 2003.
72. Money, Shimp, and Sakano, “Celebrity Endorsements in Japan and the United States.”
73. Advertising Age International, 1997.
74. I learned a great deal from an interview with the director of foreign rights at a major Hollywood studio. He explained to me that romances and humor don’t sell abroad, but action films do. Most countries can do their own comedy and romance, but action requires a large start-up cost to film. By extension, those stars who are in the films that have foreign market appeal are more likely to appeal personally to these audiences as well.
75. David Blecken, “Live Issue…Can Overseas Celebrities Sell Brands in China?” Media, September 10, 2009.
76. One study found that celebrities appeared in 48 percent of Japanese commercials and about half of Korean ads. Lee, Choi, and Tsai, “Celebrity Advertising in Japan and Korea.”
77. B. Moore, “Following the Stars,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2009.
78. Miller et al., “The Celebrity 100,” Forbes.com.
79. To be clear, although sometimes the public becomes aware of the actual numbers behind a deal, this is not inherently public knowledge. One of the celebrity journalists I interviewed said that it is very difficult to get precise numbers. The price tag of the deal is purposely not always disclosed. As the journalist explained to me, the numbers are hard to get because if we articulate how much a star is worth, then that number can be used for future deals. Jennifer Aniston, or any other star, wants her price tag undisclosed so that she has a bargaining chip for future deals. She can then argue how important celebrity is to that particular brand. Once a star has an established price, it is much harder to argue a greater value of one’s celebrity residual, thus she has every reason to keep the numbers to herself.
80. Mail Online, “Kate Moss Signs £3 Million Design Deal with Topshop,” Daily Mail, September 2006.
81. See Kahle and Homer, “Physical Attractiveness of the Celebrity Endorser,” for research on “source credibility model,” “source attractiveness,” “expertness,” and “trustworthiness” to examine the reasons we do or don’t identify with the endorser.
82. Eric Wilson, “Fashion Week: A Controversial Debut for Lohan in Paris,” New York Times, October 4, 2009.
83. McCracken, “Who Is the Celebrity Endorser?”
84. J. G. Kaikati, “Celebrity Advertising: A Review and Synthesis,” International Journal of Advertising 6, no. 2 (1987): 93–105.
85. Tripp, Jensen, and Carlson, “The Effects of Multiple Product Endorsements by Celebrities.”
86. John Cassidy, “Rational Irrationality: Tiger’s Mental Error,” New Yorker, December 17, 2009.
87. Darren Rovell, “Tiger’s Lost Endorsements Cost IMG $4.6 Million Last Year,” CNBC.com, June 18, 2010.
88. James Surowiecki, “Branded a Cheat,” New Yorker, December 29, 2009.
8. The Democratic Celebrity
1. Darnton, “London Journal: For 20%, He Sells Scandal, Keeping Britain Agog.”
2. Lyall, “Sex! Sleaze! Filth!”
3. Darnton, “London Journal.”
4. Ibid.
5. Frith, The Celeb Diaries.
6. Lyall, “British Reality TV Star Ready to Die for the Cameras.”
7. Sinclair, “‘Jade Goody Effect’ Boosts Cervical Cancer Screening Rates.”
8. David Marshall discusses this new form of celebrity as challenging “the rigidity of class-based societies by presenting the potential to transcend these categories” (“Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way,” p. 317).
9. Turner, Understanding Celebrity. Turner calls this new form of stardom the “demotic turn” of celebrity production.
10. In Claims to Fame, Joshua Gamson uses the term “democratic celebrity” to look at the pull between deserved and undeserved fame. His definition of democratic celebrity focuses more on the role of the consumer than the star.
11. Gill, “Decade in Review: Age of the Amateur with 15 Minutes of Fame.”
12. The American Idol format is not unique to this era. The mid-eighties to mid-nineties Star Search was another televised talent show. However, Idol is unique in its ubiquity and influence and consistent ability to transform unknowns into megastars.
13. Edward Wyatt, “‘Idol’ Winners: Not Just Fame but Big Bucks,” New York Times, February 24, 2010.
14. Gabler, “Reality TV.”
15. For a very interesting account of celebrity obsession and the desire to be a celebrity, see Brim, Look at Me!
16. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 71.
17. Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industries argues that popular culture is shoved at mass audiences without any choice of their own. See Adorno, The Culture Industry; and Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
18. Several scholars have studied reality TV in great detail. See Hartley, Popular Reality and Uses of Television. Also see Jenkins and Thorburn, Democracy and New Media.
19. Carter, “A Reality TV Head Count.” Another point to be made here is that reality TV is so much cheaper to produce than sitcoms and dramas. The stars don’t get paid as much (if at all), and the pool of people who want to be contestants is endless.
20. Andrejevic, Reality TV, p. 111.
21. Davis, “The Secret World of Lonelygirl.”
22. Sternberg, “Hey There, Lonelygirl.”
23. I benefited tremendously from a conversation with Tyler Cowen, who explained democratic star power in an economic framework.
24. For a hilarious and candid account of this process, see Rebecca Mead, “The Almost It Girl,” New Yorker, October 20, 2003, p. 96.
25. Graeme Turner calls these methods “DIY production technologies.” See Turner, Understanding Celebrity, and Couldry, Media Rituals.
26. In Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy notes that fame is social mobility that is not inherited by class or position (p. 595). Democratic celebrity embodies this particular aspect of Braudy’s understanding of fame.
27. Wyatt, “‘Idol’ Winners: Not Just Fame but Big Bucks.”
28. Wyatt, “No Slowing in Cash Flow for ‘Idol.’”
29. Gill, “Decade in Review.”
30. Beard, “Welcome to the Human Zoo, Susan.”
31. Wilson, “The Pressure of Sudden TV Stardom.”
32. Cowell, “After the Britain’s Got Talent Backlash, Simon Cowell Finally Admits: ‘Sorry, I Did Make Mistakes.’”
33. Sales, “The Unreal Rise of Jon and Kate Gosselin.”
34. Rice, “TLC Halts Production on ‘Jon and Kate Plus 8,’” and “TLC Responds to Jon Gosselin” Rubinkam, “‘Jon & Kate’ Stars Being Investigated Over Child Labor Complaint.”
35. There are countless examples of democratic stars who are completely unfit for stardom. Tila Tequila, a MySpace personality, ended up on the cover of men’s magazines and with her own reality TV show. More recently she was tweeting about killing herself. She claims she is receiving help. Another U.K. reality TV star, Lizzy Bardsley, was found guilty of child cruelty and benefit fraud.
36. Gill, “Decade in Review.”
37. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, p. 84.
9. The Future of Celebrity
1. See Marshall, “Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way,” p. 322.
2. See classic sociological studies on status, hierarchy, and group formations: Blau, “A Theory of Social Integration” and “A Macrosociological Theory of Social Structure” Bottomore, Elites and Society; Breiger, “The Duality of Persons and Groups” Mills, The Power Elite.
3. Turner, “The Mass Production of Celebrity” and Understanding Celebrity.
4. For a larger discussion of the underestimated yet significant role of fans, see Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers.
5. See Weber, “The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization.”
6. Uzzi, Amaral, and Reed-Tsochas, “Small-World Networks and Management Science Research.”
7. Zucker and Darby, “Star Scientists and Institutional Transformation.”
8. This story has been changed somewhat to protect the identity of the person described.
9. See Friedman, The World Is Flat; Jacques, When China Rules the World.
10. Geddes, “An Interview with Leo Braudy.”
11. Pinksy and Young, The Mirror Effect; Young and Pinksy, “Narcissism and Celebrity.”
12. Brim, Look at Me!
13. DiSalvo, “Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head?” See also Twenge and Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic.
14. DiSalvo, “Are Social Networks Messing with Your Head?”
15. Ibid.; comScore, “More Americans Reading Entertainment News Online.”
16. comScore, “More Americans Reading Entertainment News Online.”
17. Hameed, “Facebook’s U.S. Traffic Reaches 132 Million Visitors.”
18. Facebook.com, “Press Room: Statistics.”
19. Hansell, “Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing.”