CELEBRITY as COMMODITY FETISH: Recycle Those Tropes and Posers
The digital age has created a content void, a black hole and landfill brimming with gossip and inanity that nonetheless is a reflection of who we are.
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If we want to understand ourselves, if we want to understand the civilization to which we belong, we have to understand celebrities, because the modern world of freedom, alienation and loneliness has produced them as the primary communal experience. We confront the mysteries and the terrors of life through them…Simply attacking pop culture is a false flag, a path of least resistance.
“Religion, like art, philosophy, and any other product of human culture, develops as an essentially futile attempt to solve the problem of civilized discontentment; yet as we shall see, Freud has nothing better to offer us, for he doubts the very possibility of any genuine solution to human unhappiness.” ….
Celebrity culture is religion in disguise. It pretends to be junk while giving us the sustenance that we need. Celebrities live like gods; they act like gods. They dwell in the dark recesses of our souls where we crave the images of gods. In the aisles of the supermarkets they stare down at us like the saints and gargoyles that once crowded the cornices of medieval cathedrals with the iconography of suffering, or like sculptures in Hindu temples that celebrate birth, sex, death, rebirth.
