Desecrating Celebrity. Proceedings of the IV International Celebrity Studies Journal Conference Edited by Romana Andò and Fabio Corsini Edizioni Nuova Cultura Copyright © 2019 Edizioni Nuova Cultura - Roma ISBN: 9788833652719 DOI: 10.4458/2719 Copertina: Marco Pigliapoco Composizione grafica: Marco Pigliapoco Revisione a cura dell’Autore È vietata la riproduzione non autorizzata, anche parziale, realizzata con qualsiasi mezzo, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico. Table of contents Romana Andò, Fabio Corsini Introduction .............................................................................................................. 5 Stars, Celebrities, and Fame Cristina Colet Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935): Celebrating a Star, Desecrating the Woman ................. 17 Renata Gravina Nijinsky and the Parable of Life as a ‘Work of Art’ .................................................. 33 Ian Dixon Fame Rotting on The Slimy Thoroughfare: David Bowie Desecrating Celebritization in ‘Diamond Dogs’ ................................. 47 Francesca Moretti Beyoncé: The Black Goddess. How Her Pregnancy Revelation Mirrors Her Celebrification Strategy ............................................................................................ 63 Power, Politics, and Prestige Arrigo Bonifacio Celebrity Management and the Struggle for Power: The Case of Marshal Tito ....... 81 Fabiana Moraes Poverty, Status and Celebrification of Everyday Life: Questioning and Confirming the Model for Existence of Celebrities on Instagram ...................... 95 Valentina Signorelli Famous Last Words - A Comparative Focus on Resignation Speeches to Trace Contemporary European Instability: The Cases of David Cameron and Matteo Renzi .................................................................................................... 109 3 Table of contents Celebrity Strategies for the Market and Beyond Jeroen Jansen Publishing Strategies and Celebrity in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. The Case of Gerbrand Bredero ................................................................................ 131 Neil Alperstein Selling out and Sailing Onward: How Micro-Celebrities Manage their Self-Presentation on Social Media .................................................................. 147 Sinem Gudum Influencer Marketing and Redefining Fame in Social Media Advertisements ...... 165 Elisabetta Zurovac, Giovanni Boccia Artieri Performing and Perceiving the Microcelebrity Status in Snapchat: An Italian Case Study ............................................................................................. 179 Contributors .......................................................................................................... 199 4 Introduction Romana Andò, Fabio Corsini The complex process of being a celebrity is something that no one can predict. It is the variable, occasionally irregular and totally impulsive, result of a continuous negotiation of values and meanings between the audience, the market and the celebrity. Rather than being merely a media production and media texts to be consumed, celebri- ties are constantly crossing the audience/production boundaries, nur- turing their relationship with them through very intense para-social and “multi-social” interactions, that are currently enhanced within the new media eco-system1. To survive the flowing time and the constant rise of new celebri- ties, then, a celebrity needs an audience by which to be adored2, which means that the celebrity will be incessantly validated by the audience’s appropriation of the celebrity. In a sort of plug and play process, the celebrity becomes exploitable and definitely usable by the audience in their individual identity-building process, to the point that the emo- tional investment toward the celebrity’s success as well as their failure embodies the individuals’ attempts to face their own emotions and their rationalisation. Traditionally, a huge part of this process happened in the audience’s imagination. Referring to Fiske’s theory about fans3, we may state that the appropriation of a celebrity consists of, firstly, the semiotic productivity, 1 David Giles, Twenty-First Century Celebrity. Fame in Digital Culture, Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2018. 2 Lisa A. Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 3 John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom”, in Lisa A. Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, New Yok and London: Routledge, 1992. 5 Romana Andò, Fabio Corsini namely the ‘essentially interior’ work concerned with how audience mem- bers understand media texts and, of course, celebrities. This work results in the articulation4 between what the audience perceives and symbolically recognises in the celebrity’s public representation and what this means for them in the reflexive private work on their own identity. However, following Garfinkel’s definition of degradation rituals, the degradation ceremony that assumes a close resemblance to ceremonies of investiture and elevation, has to be performed out loud and in public because the degraded person is defined as such by “the denouncer” and “the witness” who all together define “the perpetrator” as out of society’s standards and motive as “moral indignation [as] a social affect”5. The role of the audience is once more crucial: accreditation and degradation rituals without witnesses do not have a social impact. As sociologists and media and audience scholars, when we approached the theme of celebrification6 and celebrity desecration to launch the IV Celebrity Studies Journal conference, held in Rome in June 2018, we were mostly attracted by the role of the audiences in this process; in particu- lar, we were (and still are) interested in analysing how celebrities’ pub- lic representations matter in both private and collective negotiations of social and moral meanings especially when it comes to the moments of celebrification and desecration or de-celebrification. In this regard, one of the key relevant points is the relation between the audience’s personal understanding, the elaboration of the celebrity and the practices of public scrutiny, and how this is changing in the new media ecosystem. As a matter of fact, for decades, audiences have been described as silent and passive in front of electronic media and this ordinary representation was totally incompatible with the idea of the public as “an orientation to collective and consensual action”7. 4 Stuart Hall, “Who needs identity”. Questions of cultural identity, 16(2), 1-17. 1996 5 Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies”, in Amer- ican Journal of Sociology, 61, 420 -424, p. 421, 1956. 6 Olivier Driessens, ‘The celebritization of society and culture: Understanding the structural dynamics of celebrity culture’, International journal of cultural studies, November 2013, 16: 6, pp. 641-657, 2013. 7 Sonia Livingstone, “On the relation between audiences and publics”. In Sonia Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and publics : when cultural engagement matters for the public 6 Introduction Within this frame, the idea is an unbridgeable gap between the ‘coach potatoes’ in front of the television and those who witnessed the accred- itation and degradation rituals described by Garfinkel8. Actually, the private work of the audience is always a public matter if we consider that “‘public’ refers to a shared understanding or inclu- sion in a common forum (for ‘audiences’ may be similarly described)”9. Moreover, the audience/fan constantly moves from the private (inter- nal) understanding of semiotic productivity to public (shared out loud) enunciative productivity, that can “occur only within immediate social relationships”10. In other words, the reciprocal identification among the audience’s thoughts and feelings occurs because of a shared public frame motivated by media content. Today, the scrutiny power of the audience is more publicly per- formed than in the past, as a result of digital platforms (i.e., social media) where the audience may easily and immediately share their opinion and build a common framework. As a consequence of social media, audiences are now perceived as noisy again (as well as in the public forum described by Garfinkel11) even though they seem to have less time to consolidate the reflexive interpretation of the celebrity. In other words, the distinction between semiotic and enunciative produc- tivity is definitely collapsing. Concerning group viewing situations, Jenkins stated that the distinction, between semiotic productivity (the popular construction of meanings at the moment of reception) and enunciative productivity (the articu- lation of meaning through dress, display, and gossip), . breaks down since the moment of reception [for the fan] is often also the moment of enunciation12. sphere. Changing media - changing Europe series (2). Intellect Books, Bristol, UK, p. 17, 2005. 8 Harold Garfinkel, op. cit., 1956. 9 Sonia Livingston, op. cit. p. 1.7 10 John Fiske, op. cit., p. 39. 11 Harold Garfinkel, op. cit., 195.6 12 Henry Jenkin, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 278. 7 Romana Andò, Fabio Corsini More dramatically, as Hills suggested, in the context of web 2.0, ‘group viewing’ can extend to all those who are watching a broadcast and live-tweeting it via hashtags.[…]. As fan audiences watch TV and then live-tweet along, they shift ‘interior’ semiotic productivity into socially-shared