Personally I might have a high opinion of a singer or novelist or artist, but I don't worship the ground they tread on. I see them as another human being, talented in some ways but probably deeply flawed in other ways.
There's a general tendency to idealise celebrities and put them on a pedestal as if they're somehow far superior to the rest of us.
Even when the celebrity is dead, the worship goes on. There are hundreds of people who dress like Elvis and perform like Elvis. Why oh why?
As for those people deluded enough to think they have a romantic relationship with the celebrity and badger them non-stop with love letters, I feel for the person who's on the receiving end of it all.
Meanwhile Taylor Swift mania has passed me by. What's all the fuss about?
Celebrity-worship seems to be most common among people under thirty. One rarely runs into such extreme manifestations of it among people older than that. It also seems to be commoner among females than males. (Although one could argue that the obsession of many middle-aged males about professional-sports stars and teams -- football and baseball in the US, soccer in Europe and Latin America -- is somewhat similar.)
ReplyDeleteI don't claim to understand the way some people get so caught up in it. I do feel a fascination about the truly great among humanity -- Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Hawking, and others like them -- but I don't obsess about it, and I would not harass them with pointless fan letters and suchlike if they were alive today.
There is, however, a danger when the inability to understand celebrity-worship becomes disdain for it. Politics junkies in the US often express frustration that the latest Taylor Swift album generates so much more mass excitement than some politician's skull-grindingly boring speech about tax credits for single parents of children under 6 with an annual income of less than..... (zzzzzz). But like it or not, the power of mass culture is very real, and political movements would do better to try to harness the influence of celebrities than to sneer at people who adore them.