‘Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life’, says Fred Inglis in A Short History of Celebrity (2010). His statement is undoubtedly true: we are endlessly confronted with celebrities in the press, on television and on the Internet. Even animals can become celebrities . What are we to make of Keiko, the killer whale in the film Free Willy (1993)? Or of little Knut, the polar bear cub that was born in Berlin Zoo in 2006, around which a whole merchandising industry sprang up, replete with T-shirts and coffee mugs? But it is especially people who become celebrities, behave accordingly and who are accepted as such by the audience. Those without fame dream about becoming famous because for many people, fame is a desirable asset. Hollywood in particular has produced a well-nigh endless string of stars. Gossip magazines about celebrities are read avidly the world over. Thus, it is not too far-fetched to dub the Western world, with Robert van Krieken, a Celebrity Society: our entire economic, political and social existence has been organized around celebrities.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘famous’ thus: ‘Celebrated in fame or public report; much talked about, renowned’. This definition encompasses two aspects: to become a celebrity, one needs to be widely known, and one needs to do something that is valued positively. This definition is not satisfactory, however. Fame is a commodity that cannot be achieved independently: it requires an act of attribution, by audiences, cultural institutions or ‘intermediaries’. In this regard the celebrity phenomenon can be understood in the light of what Pierre Bourdieu terms the attribution of ‘symbolic capital’. Twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol have demonstrated that the value of a work does not lie in the object itself but in the attention it manages to garner. Art has no intrinsic quality, as Bourdieu concludes form these and other examples: its symbolic value is attributed by institutions. A similar argument could be made for celebrity. Max Weber defines charisma, an important element of celebrity culture, as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.