The Star as Icon

Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption

Daniel Herwitz (Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor, University of Michigan)

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English

Columbia University Press
16 October 2008

Philosophy: aesthetics; Popular culture; Popular beliefs & controversial knowledge; Media, information & communication industries

Princess Diana, Jackie O, Grace Kelly-the star icon is the most talked about yet least understood persona. The object of adoration, fantasy, and cult obsession, the star icon is a celebrity, yet she is also something more: a dazzling figure at the center of a media pantomime that is at once voyeuristic and zealously guarded. With skill and humor, Daniel Herwitz pokes at the gears of the celebrity-making machine, recruiting a philosopher's interest in the media, an eye for society, and a love of popular culture to divine our yearning for these iconic figures and the role they play in our lives.

Herwitz portrays the star icon as caught between transcendence and trauma. An effervescent being living on a distant, exalted planet, the star icon is also a melodramatic heroine desperate to escape her life and the ever-watchful eye of the media. The public buoys her up and then eagerly watches her fall, her collapse providing a satisfying conclusion to a story sensationally told-while leaving the public yearning for a rebirth.

Herwitz locates this double life in the opposing tensions of film, television, religion, and consumer culture, offering fresh perspectives on these subjects while ingeniously mapping society's creation (and destruction) of these special aesthetic stars. Herwitz has a soft spot for popular culture yet remains deeply skeptical of public illusion. He worries that the media distances us from even minimal insight into those who are transfigured into star icons. It also blinds us to the shaping of our political present.

By: Daniel Herwitz (Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor University of Michigan)
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 354g
ISBN: 9780231145404
ISBN 10: 0231145403
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 16 October 2008
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface and Acknowledgments 1. The Candle in the Wind 2. There Is Only One Star Icon (Except in a Warhol Picture) 3. Therefore Not All Idols Are American 4. A Star Is Born 5. The Film Aura: An Intermediate Case 6. Stargazing and Spying 7. Teleaesthetics 8. Diana Haunted and Hunted on TV 9. Star Aura in Consumer Society (and Other Fatalities) Notes Index

Daniel Herwitz is the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of Humanities and director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on the aesthetics of film, music, and visual art, and his monograph on the Indian painter M. F. Husain won a National Book Award in that country. Herwitz is the author of Race and Reconciliation, a book based on his experiences in South Africa, and short stories that have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review. A philosopher by training, Herwitz is also the coeditor, with Lydia Goehr, of The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera.

Reviews for The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption

Essential for those with a keen interest in the sociology of popular culture and stardom. Library Journal A dazzling book... that manages to pack an astonishing amount of detail and depth into a modest number of pages... Highly recommended. Choice The Star as Icon can be compared with Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, but is more contemporary and less optimistic. The book studies significant movies ( Rear Window, The Philadelphia Story), is culturally literate, and is very good on the idea of aura and popular culture as it has evolved since Walter Benjamin. Required reading for any course in film studies. -- Arthur Danto, Columbia University An eloquent essay that contributes to the contemporary discourse on celebrity and stardom. -- Leung Wing-Fai Film Philosophy