ABSTRACT
What is celebrity? There is little consensus in either academia or popular culture over its significance, depth, vacuity, meaning, history and fluctuating fortunes, but there is a sizeable amount of debate. In media, film and cultural studies a range of approaches has been adopted, from screen studies to political economy, from ideological critique to audience research. Celebrity has therefore been variously understood as an inevitable part of some kind of universal ‘human condition’, as psychoanalytic mystery to be unwrapped, structural by-product of the PR industry, vestige of Romantic individualism and commodity fetish par excellence. Let us dip an analytical toe in its spangled waters.
