Why Being a Celebrity Is Big Business By Knowledge@Wharton
Portuguese soccer great Cristiano Renaldo has 183 million followers on Instagram, making him the most followed celebrity on the social media site in 2019. In fact, Renaldo has more Instagram followers than his native country has people — Portugal’s population stands at a little more than 10 million. His feed is rather banal, with plenty of pictures of family members and him playing soccer, yet fans pore over every shot. The world’s obsession with celebrity culture is the focus of a new book by Sharon Marcus, an English and comparative literature professor at Columbia University.
Knowledge@Wharton: Why did you choose this topic for a book?
The Drama of Celebrity reaches back to the 19th century to show that stardom and the struggles that go along with it are nothing new. Getting to the top is hard enough, but staying there is even tougher. Marcus explains how the most successful celebrities learn to manipulate the media of their day to wrest control from outside forces and shape their own messages. She recently appeared on the Knowledge Wharton radio show on SiriusXM to talk about her book. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)
I think part of what I was interested in is what we’re always interested in regarding celebrities, which is you have an image of someone. It might be very compelling because they’re beautiful or they’re great at sports or they’re charismatic, and you want to know more. That was my introduction to celebrity, and I was always interested in why I and other people were so interested in celebrity.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Sharon Marcus: There’s a personal answer to that question, which is even as a very young child, I was interested in celebrity. As a sign of my future nerdom, I was interested in dead celebrities. Where my friends were talking about David Cassidy or Captain and Tennille or which Charlie’s Angel they liked the best, I was really interested in Elizabeth Taylor and old Hollywood. This was the 1970s, and I was looking back to the 1930s and 1940s.
Then there’s an academic, scholarly answer to that question. My last book was about Victorian England, and I got very interested in Oscar Wilde when I was writing it. The more
