View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OpenArchive@CBS Celebrities, Culture and a Name Economy Brian Moeran Visiting Professor Department of Intercultural Communication and Management Copenhagen Business School Dalgas Have 15 DK-2000 Frederiksberg Denmark
[email protected] Abstract Drawing on previous research, this paper discusses how celebrities act as intermediaries between culture and economy in the promotional industries. By focusing on celebrity endorsements in advertising, it outlines how film actors and actresses, athletes, models, pop singers, sportsmen and women mediate between producers and consumers via the products and services that they endorse. Here celebrities are cultural intermediaries as they give commodities ‘cultural personalities’ and perform across different media, linking different cultural spheres into an integrated whole. But, given the facts that who they advertise for and what they do or do not do have major financial implications for the corporations whose products they endorse, celebrities can also be said to be economic intermediaries. Introduction The relation between culture and economy is, to say the least, tricky. It is one that has been exercising the minds of scholars in management, organisation and consumer studies, on the one hand, and of those in disciplines like sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, on the other. Yet, even though it is now well over two decades since Raymond Williams (1977: 136) noted that ‘large scale capitalist economic activity and cultural production are now inseparable’, we have not got that much further in our understandings of just how they are inseparable. This paper focuses on the activities of celebrities, and in particular of models, as a means of trying to bridge the conceptual gap between culture and economy.