Manufactured celebrity images create audience demand to pierce to the real person

Evidence

This divorce between image and person was essential for the star, a separation that, for instance, fed and continues to feed the gossip and paparazzi industries, industries organized around the knowledge that the image of the “star” conceals the “person” beyond the image. Because the audience knows, to some degree, that the image of the star is itself manufactured, then there is a desire to get to the reality obscured by industry—a reality rife with scandal and abuse. One desires to move past the imaginary to the real, encountering the other as if the interpersonal separation between fan and star is merely an illusion of industry. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 130

Categorization

• XREF: The star’s image-person split prefigures the influencer’s supposed merger of the two; useful contrast for the Corpocene framework. — connects to: Television could manufacture overnight celebrities from ordinary contestants. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 482; Classic celebrity discourse centers on the gap between image and the real person — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 196