ABSTRACT
Promotional authorship in the media industries is a concept defined by dichotomies: old discourses and new practices, the persistent art and commerce binary, auteurism and branding. The various case studies that make up this book highlight the tensions that these dichotomies entail, and explore how they are negotiated in order to take the ‘economic world reversed’ (Bourdieu, 1995) and use it as a source of economic value. The challenges to this value lie in reconciling the opposition between the ‘aesthetic of the signature’, in which the proper name carries auratic, culturally authenticating value, and ‘aesthetic of the brand’, in which said name guarantees specific attributes and qualities, and stands out by merit of its familiarity to audiences (Frow, 2002). In the conditions of the early 21st Century media landscape, shaped as they are by crowdedness and ferocious competition for attention, it is the latter capacity of creator names to act as brand names that emerge as profoundly attractive to the media industries. Nonetheless, it continues to find itself coached in the terms of the former.
