FameEconomy
From UoWiki
...the star system in the arts operates on two principles. The maximum amount of profit is produced from investment in the smallest number of performers; these are the "stars." Stars exist only by checks to the majority of artists practicing their art ...if 500 people are famous, no one is, and so to find someone you can call a recognizable personality, a man who stands out, at least 490 must be pushed into the background. Those 490 must be positively unrewarded in the same measure the 10 are rewarded... (Richard Sennett, 'The Fall of Public Man')
The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But I doubt whether anywhere else the difference between the masterpieces and the average is as large as it is in the European tradition of the last five centuries. The difference is not only a question of skill and imagination, but also of morale. The average work - and increasingly after the sixteenth century - was produced cynically: that is to say its content, its message, the values it was nominally upholding were less meaningful for the producer than the finishing of the commission. Hack work is not the result of clumsiness or provincialism: it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the job. (John Berger, 'Past Seen from a Possible Future', in 'The Look of Things')
Discuss...
From a business point of view, there are many advantages in the star system. The star has tangible features which can be advertised and marketed - a face, a body, a pair of legs, a certain type of personality, real or synthetic - and can be typed as the wicked villain, the honest hero, the fatal siren, the sweet young girl, the neurotic woman. The system provides a formula easy to understand and has made the production of movies seem more like just another business. The use of this formula may serve also to protect executives from talent and having to pay too much attention to such intangibles as quality of a story or acting. Here is a standardised product which they can understand, which can be advertised and sold, and which not only they, but also banks and exhibitors, regard as insurance for large profits (Hortense Powdermaker in her "anthropological investigation" of 'Hollywood, The Dream Factory').
This reminds me of an anecdote I heard of the pioneering Hollywood producer Carl Laemmle (the guy who produced the 1930 version of 'All Quiet On The Western Front') who planted a story in the St. Louis Post - Despatch to the effect that Florence Lawrence, up to then known as the Biograph Girl had been killed by a trolley car in St. Louis. He followed it a day later with an advertisement in the Trade Press denouncing the story as a vicious lie. This event was the first occasion that a film actor's name became known to the public. Here's an overwiew of how movie stardom came about-
...how the producers had resisted giving billing to the actors who played in their little films; how the actors themselves, regarding appearance in a medium that robbed them of what they regarded as their prime artistic resource, their voice, had been glad to hide their shame with anonymity; how the public had begun singling them out of the crowds onscreen, demanding to know more about them and, more important, demanding to know, in advance, which pictures featured their favourites; how the demand for stars was quickly perceived as a factor that could stabilize the industry, since this demand was predictable in a way that the demand for stories, or even genres was not; how certain actors achieved unprecedented heights of popularity and prosperity almost over night in the period 1915-1920; and how this phenomenon, this beginning of a new celebrity system, destroyed or crippled almost everyone caught up in it. (Richard Schickel, 'His Picture in the Papers').
That's really interesting. The passage from Richard Sennett (top) is about the star system in classical music in the 19th century. (He was a concert cellist till he damaged his hand in his late twenties and became a sociologist.) His argument is that the rise of the charismatic performer (with Paganini) and the way it changed people's expectations of a concert as an event - from going to hear a piece of music to going to hear an interpretation of a piece - paralleled the privatisation of social life, in which we are (were) no longer all players, but pursue a painfully-sought and unplayful authenticity. This was the era when the convention of the silent audience emerged. In contrast to the newly passive audience, the star is licensed to perform, by virtue of having some special quality - whereas in the eighteenth century, musicians or actors had been treated as servants. The thing is (and maybe this relates to Saul's piece about creative commons, etc, which this spun off from) that the elevation of (a minority of) performers into stars isn't a recognition of the value of their labour, but a mystification of it. (Akin to the mystification of products in the department stores that first appeared in mid-19th C capitals.)
Any more thoughts?
Yes.
> The thing is (and maybe this relates to Saul's piece about creative commons, etc, > which this spun off from) that the elevation of (a minority of) performers into > stars isn't a recognition of the value of their labour, but a mystification of it. > (Akin to the mystification of products in the department stores that first appeared > in mid-19th C capitals.)
Yes.
- "Here's the deal, folks. You do a commercial - you're off the artistic roll call, forever. End of story. Okay? You're another corporate fucking shill, another whore at the captialist gang bang, and if you do a commercial, there's a price on your head, everything you say is suspect and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink; uuurrgh, uuurgh, sploosh." - Bill Hicks
The minor distinction Berger makes, between art that satisfies a market, and 'true' virtuosity or something, misses your point. The mystification is not a mystification of the process, or the defiling of some kind of sacred relic by its mass production or poor quality imitation - it's the turning of the audience into commodity - when we contribute towards the maintenance of a celebrity, we're only part-subsidising our own sale as marketing demographics and attention-yielding cattle. So the venerated process of making something and being rewarded by it gaining popular recognition is inverted - where the popular recognition of the thing is created by manufacturing the celebrity.
It's a sick business, especially when it's coupled with state-supported propaganda and a license to engage in pseudo dissent.
