Once we lived in a world tyrannised by trivia. It was a world in which the ascendancy of celebrity culture had corrupted public discourse, destroyed values and trashed aesthetic standards.
Or so many commentators once claimed. They saw a world "obsessed" by Big Brother contestants and a stream of talentless Hurleys and Halliwells. Like passive smokers, the educated elite inhaled the fumes of the fame fixation-and felt dizzy and disgusted.
Then came the terrorist attacks of 11th September and within days the news came from the US that celebrity culture was dead. Graydon Carter (editor of Vanity Fair) said that post-11th September something fundamental had changed in our values. He said, "things that were considered frivolous are going to disappear." British journalists joined in.
Whether we are really seeing the death of celebrity culture is debatable. But the agonised reaction in the west to the events of 11th September suggests that critics of celebrity culture were wrong. The fame fixation was a maladie imaginaire, one that merely reflected the traditional hostility of the liberal intelligentsia to the frivolous but innocent pleasures of the masses.
Anxiety about the insidious influence of celebrity is hardly new. Forty years ago, in The Image, the American historian Daniel J Boorstin argued that celebrities-creations of the PR industry-had replaced men and women of real achievement. He warned that we were losing the ability to distinguish between "reality" and star-studded "pseudo events."
By the 1970s stars had become so accessible that Warhol could make his famous prophecy about 15-minute fame. But for many writers and commentators the democratisation of fame had a dark side. It was driving the common man crazy. They saw new forms of star-fixated life crawling into the headlines: stalkers of soap stars, Michael Jackson fanatics, Elvis worshippers. We got the murder of Lennon and the shooting of Reagan. The innocence of old world fandom, they said, had turned into a deadly fanaticism.
Ordinary people, it seemed, were no longer content to sit on the outside with their faces pressed against the glass, watching the famous inside have all the fun. They wanted in. Naturally those on the inside were not happy about the common man's attempts to join the aristocracy of celebrity.
This is the anxiety of Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982) and Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995). Both films featured pathetic characters who would do anything to become famous. Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) kidnaps a talk show host while wannabe television presenter Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) will murder to help her career.
At least Pupkin and Stone thought they had talent and a legitimate claim to fame. With the rise of reality television in the late 1990s it was no longer necessary to pretend to be an actor or a singer. Ordinary people could become famous just for being ordinary. Ed TV, The Truman Show and Woody Allen's Celebrity were about the horrors of this new talentless celebrity.
Warhol's future had arrived and Britain's cultural elite were horrified. "Here are people becoming famous for videotaping their clich?d thoughts, for flashing their breasts," wrote Salman Rushdie of Big Brother. Martin Amis in the War Against Clich? writes about becoming famous "by abasing yourself on some television nerdathon."
The old celebrity class resented the erosion of the distinction between deserving and undeserving celebrity. And this led to what I call the apocalyptic view of celebrity, the idea that celebrity culture has broken the bonds of society and changed the kind of people we are. Central to the apocalypse is a postmodern version of the end of history: celebrity has triumphed over all other ideologies. "It is," writes Bryan Appleyard, "the ideology of our time."
According to Ziauddin Sardar celebrities "perform the roles that were once carried out by religion or ideology... we have swapped kinship ties for imaginary relationships." For Appleyard we live in a world in which fame alone is of "value and dignity counts for nothing." But when they talk about "we" they don't mean people like themselves. They mean the masses.
Of course people are interested in the doings and sayings of celebrities. But anyone who thinks that a fascination with the famous belongs to readers of Hello! have never been at a drinks party and seen how people react when Salman Rushdie enters the room.
Yes, people enjoy reading all kinds of tittle-tattle, and there is more celebrity media than ever before. This is undeniable. But the apocalyptic view claims that people live such impoverished lives that without celebrity culture they would have nothing to talk or think or even dream about. In the real world people care about thousands of things that have nothing to do with celebrity. Sardar's claim that "nothing moves in our universe without the imprint of celebrity" is idiotic.
For most people celebrity culture is escapist fun. You tune in to celebrity soap operas-Robbie and Geri or Posh and Becks-and you tune out and get on with life. The cultural elite has always despised the pleasures of the common man-once it was pulp fiction, Hollywood, pop music, television; now it's celebrity. Particularly offensive is the idea that we care more about the famous than family, friends or fellow citizens. But look at the outpouring of grief and solidarity in the west that followed the terror attacks. Were these the reactions of a people who cared for nothing but celebrity?
If the apocalyptic view was correct there would have been a period of emotional confusion as the masses groped around searching for the humane values and sentiments they supposedly no longer possessed. Clearly, that did not happen. Celebrity culture is not dead, but it is time to kill off the silly idea that we care for nothing else.
