“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE -ANDY WARHOL

Anthropologist Grant McCracken points to this New York Times article by David Carr about former Us Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller and makes an interesting point about the ideological effects of the celebrity-gossip tabloid Fuller pioneered. The [article’s] most illuminated observation comes from Janice Min.... Here’s how Min explains Fuller’s success. “She is able to almost distill the id of the reader.  She channels them in a way few others do, and what she heard is: ‘I don’t care about your acting method in your last movie. I just want to know what workout you used to get that fabulous body.’ “
This suggests that there has been a shift in the celebrity culture, a movement from admiration to imitation. Fans now treat the star less as a god and more as a set of transformational pointers. Celebrities by this reckoning are better than us but not different from us. This is a very big change. Among other things, it marks the democratization of celebrity and the rise of a culture in which everyone imagines themselves a star, or at least transform themselves with a star’s effort and care.

-Pop Matters
July 10 2008