Celebrity and fame: a process analysis,

FT Amy Winehouse and the Queen

By Edwin Creely

RESEARCH BEGINS WITH CURIOSITY

I am curious about…• The nature of celebrity and its ontology• Amy Winehouse, celebrity and the forces that

created and destroyed her• The Queen as a performer of fame

HOW WILL I EXPLORE MY CURIOSITY?

Through Whitehead’s process philosophyThree key ideas:• Nothing exists for itself and of itself, but it has uniqueness only as it is

positioned in a novel way in relation to the other, as subject to subject

• There is a process of becoming out of potentiality that implies the coming into being of a unique set of entities in subjective relationship that creates a distinctive experience and formation (concrescence).

• The world is encountered through ‘prehension’, which means the givenness of something, together with an ability as humans to be consciously aware of and grasp events in the physical world causally.

ELABORATING SOME TERMS

KnownnessI take ‘knownness’ to means varying levels of tacit public knowledge about and appreciation of a performer, usually gained through a body of work and accomplishments, and a set of affirming interactions, networks and relationships accumulated over time. This is the core of enduring fame.

CelebrityI take celebrity to mean a particularly striking prominence and recognisability of a person in the various media forms, including Twitter and other social media. It is especially palpable and concrete, imbued with an individual’s personas, and linked to public reception and resonance in consumers’ visual mindstreams through facial, name and brand recognition. Celebrity is a collocation of embodied phenomena with a disembodied set of mediatised images which become distributed and commoditized in global media outlets. Thus, at least partially, celebrity is manufactured and constructed in response to public taste and target markets. Its semantics also revolve around the associations of the word itself with particular public figures and it designation to certain types of people.

FameFame I take to mean a state of being eminent or having renown forged in a society’s collective consciousness, by which I mean a society’s given notions of accomplishment that are shared by individuals and groups within that society. It is a conceptual category that centres on enduring notions of public success or an attribution of particular valuableness that emerges from what a society deems as significant or leads to affluence. One can speak of a person having fame as a state of being sustained in a particular cultural matrix; but one can also postulate fame as a meta-cultural frame of valuing within a society. Thus, the notion of fame forms the socio-cultural ground in which celebrity is actuated.

SOME KEY NOTIONS ABOUT FAME AND CELEBRITY

• Performance ability vs product construction• Codification of performance expectations or

performing celebrity• Reception as desire: to-be-like, to-be-with • Existential connection, taste and identity• Power and marketability of the image

THE NOTION OF VISIBILITY

The term ‘visibility’ can be conceived as one indicator of the the degree of celebrity. This term is taken to mean both the overt representations in media forms and the reception of such representations by consumers, leading to how heightened the celebrity is in a consumer's consciousness or a distinct conjuration associated with a celebrity. It is this distinct coming-together or gestalt of representation and reception that creates visibility.

AMY WINEHOUSE

Back to Black became the UK's best selling album of the 21st century

Winehouse's final recording was a duet entitled "Body and Soul" with Tony Bennet

Died of alcohol poisoning at 27

AMY WINEHOUSE: A PROCESS ANALYSIS

Winehouse’s celebrity as a novel and idiosyncratic phenomenon containing a collocation or a concrescence of• her distinctive style, presentation and voice, compared to Sarah Vaughan (her

embodiments)• connected soulful music that was inter-generational (her stylistic features) • the archetypal story of the insignificant lower middle class Jewish girl made good

(grand narrative of success and fall from grace)• Juxtaposition of her sixties fashion sense with a punk sensibility (postmodern

aesthetic perpetuated by the paparazzi)• celebrity as a caustic phenomenon for her that shaped her subjectivity (she did

not perform celebrity well or a resistance to construction as celebrity)• Notoriety related to alcohol and drug consumption, and her ‘extreme’

performances. (Faux Pas in tension with Nostalgia)• Strong cross-generational reception—echoes of the past and embodiment in the

present (potentiality as a historicity)

A gang of drug traffickers is inserting pictures of late British singer Amy Winehouse in their bags of cocaine to improve sales, Brazilian police said on Tuesday.The clear plastic bags carry a paper insert with a picture of the addicted 27-year-old singer, who died at her north London home on July 23. She is described in the insert as "Amy House".Bags of cocaine with Winehouse's picture were being sold at between 10 and 25 reals (about $6 to $15), said Lieutenant Colonel Glaucio Moreira, who led a police raid in the shanty town of Manginhos that made the find.

POWER OF WINEHOUSE’S VISIBILITY

THE QUEEN

58 Years as Monarch

Revered still, and by a younger generation

THE QUEEN: A PROCESS ANALYSISThe Queen’s celebrity and fame as a novel and idiosyncratic phenomenon containing a collocation or a concrescence of• Tradition (her historicity) and endurance (her personal stability and

longevity)• The performative of royalty (The Queen puts on royalty and becomes

royalty as an embodied state that provokes a contrived reverential response)

• The sacred places of royalty (palaces of the geographical and palaces of the imagination)

• Royalty as framed commodity (framed as royal and so protected as royal, carefully constructed as royal)

• The mythology of beneficence (the Queen brings good or embodies good and charitability)

• Her authority de jure (her being as Queen is at the core of the legal system)