Organized celebrity fame ineluctably leads to nothingness.

Evidence

Writers bent on a career talk of their agents as naturally as their predecessors of their publishers, who even then had a foot in the advertising business. They assume personal responsibility for becoming famous, and thus in a sense for their after-life – for what, in totally organized society, can hope to be remembered if it is not already known? – and purchase from the lackeys of the trusts, as in former times from the Church, an expectation of immortality. But no blessing goes with it. Just as voluntary memory and utter oblivion always belonged together, organized fame and remembrance lead ineluctably to nothingness, the foretaste of which is perceptible in the hectic doings of all celebrities. The famous are not happy in their lot. They become brand-name commodities, alien and incomprehensible to themselves, and, as their own living images, they are as if dead. In their pretentious concern for their aureoles they squander the disinterested energy that is alone capable of permanence. The inhuman indifference and contempt instantaneously visited on the fallen idols of the culture industry reveals the truth about their fame, though without granting those disdainful of it any better hopes of posterity. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 114

Categorization

• XREF: The celebrity-as-living-dead, brand-name commodity anticipates Debord’s society of the spectacle and discourses on the influencer as alienated self-image.
• CANDY: ‘The famous are not happy in their lot. They become brand-name commodities… as if dead’ — punchy, quotable observation about fame as self-alienation.