From Ivory Tower to Twitter: Rethinking the Cultural Critic in Contemporary Media Culture
The Celebrity as a Cross-Media Cultural Authority
This subproject addresses the implications for a cultural public sphere, where ‘celebrity’ equals ‘authority’ and often bypasses traditional genres of cultural criticism. In more detail, the project develops a theoretical framework for analyzing how ‘the achieved celebrity’ (Rojek 2001) exemplifies ‘the media-made arbiter of taste’ in Kristensen & From's (2015) recent typology of the Heterogeneous Cultural Critic. They do so by performing as authoritative cultural critics in different media genres when using, praising, and ‘liking’ cultural products.
The focus of the sub-project is on factual media genre including:
a) Danish factual entertainment TV-shows like "Kender du typen" (DR), "Filmselskabet" (DR) and "Toppen af Poppen" (TV2). These programmes present celebrities in different ways and they are asked to evaluate (implicitly or explicitly) specific cultural products, performances or lifestyles:
b) The portrait-interview, in particular in high fashion magazines (and newspapers) in which the celebrity is often endorsing his or her latest film, show or book, but also represents a particular lifestyle to the reader;
c) Celebrities on their social media profiles, in particular Instagram and Facebook, where they demonstrate how they see themselves and want to be seen and thereby present specific cultural tastes and preferences.
Thus, the celebrity can be seen as a 1) ‘media-made arbiter of taste’, 2) lifestyle expert, and 3) ideal consumer. These categories makes it possible to characterize new ways of understanding the pervasive presence of celebrities as authorities to be reckoned in contemporary media culture due to their expertise as professionals within the arts (film, fashion, literature, music) and their fame within society more broadly, which both contribute to their legitimacy as cultural critics.
The theoretical framework combines concepts of recognition (Bourdieu 1984, Honneth 2006), identification (Marshall 2006, Stacey 1994) and charismatic authority (Weber 1978) with theories of genre (Ponce de Leon 2001, Turner 2004) and the reversal of cultural hierarchies in social media (Baym 2010, Jenkins et al. 2013).