In spiked, November 2, 2012

A Band Aid for the failure of politics
It is a reflection of the decline of reasoned debate and the rise of celebrity that society pays attention to popstar politics.

in Culture Wars, November 18, 2010

Stranger friends

A Short History of Celebrity, by Fred Inglis (Princeton University Press, 2010)

In many respects the 20th century saw an extension, not a revolution, in the way public figures were regarded. The likes of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin continued where Reynolds left off. After Byron has come a multitude of stars from James Dean to Pete Doherty, whose embrace of the Dionysian has enthralled and appalled.

In Culture Wars, October 23, 2008

It is a cliché that today we live in a culture obsessed by ‘celebrity’, with the lumpen proletariat forever fawning over the minutiae of talentless non-entities who are famous merely for being famous. The popularity and power wielded by Hello!magazine, the profusion of famous nobodies spawned from and spewed out by Channel Four’s Big Brother and other reality television programmes, are often cited as proof of this cultural phenomenon. Perhaps the most visible evidence of our celebrity culture can be witnessed at local newsagents, which now sell a cornucopia of cheap magazine titles devoted entirely to the inexplicably famous.