ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at certain broad changes in the organization and functions of global entertainment industries, and a critical understanding of these changes provides important mapping coordinates. In the case of Madonna, she has frequently come to serve as both the fully functional surrogate for the critic's feats of derring-do while also providing an "all access" site for the convenient superimposition of critical discourse. Madonna, as the subject of critical analysis, seems to require the elaborate conjuncture of a whole host of grandiose themes. Madonna's stardom, from Material Girl onward, has continued by the same means of elaborate self-referral, both to herself as star and to the processes of stardom. The inherent risk involved with Barry King's performance theory of stardom, like Fredric Jameson's cognitive map, is that it must be continually protected against the slide from metonymy to metaphor, from mediation to expressive causality.
