Celebrity culture  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. (La Joconde), is a 16th century oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and is one of the most famous paintings in the world. It has acquired an iconic status in popular culture. In 1963, pop artist Andy Warhol started making colorful serigraph prints of the Mona Lisa. Warhol thus consecrated her as a modern icon, similar to Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley. At the same time, his use of a stencil process and crude colors implies a criticism of the debasement of aesthetic values in a society of mass production and mass consumption.

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A celebrity culture is the structure that influences those deemed to be celebrities.

Posthumous fame

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

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

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won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 12 years after his death); author Stieg Larsson (who died with his Millennium novels unpublished); musician, artist and poet Rozz Williams.

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

See also

• Celebrity
• Superstar
• Popularity
• Fifteen minutes of fame
• Hollywood marriages
• Scientific celebrity
• Starsuckers