Lilti-InventionOfCelebrity2
The notion of celebrity wasn’t born amid the flash of camera bulbs or the unrelenting hype of Hollywood. And, as Antoine Lilti writes in The Invention of Celebrity, it’s not simply a matter of being well known. The mechanism for celebrity began to snap in place by the close of the 18th century with the rise of newspapers whose coverage erased the screen separating the private from the public lives of famous people. Its origins are at the root of modernity, a democratizing tide of collective interest born from the shared experience of “knowing” the famous through their representation in the media. A history professor at Paris’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Lilti adds that this “attachment is inseparable from an intimate, personal bond, even if it is often a distant intimacy, fictitious and unilateral.” From Voltaire and Lord Byron, the history of celebrity leaps toward Madonna and Lady Gaga.
