Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America [Paperback]

Joshua Gamson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520083539 | ISBN-13: 978-0520083530 | Publication Date: March 2, 1994

Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity's transparency and commercialism.
Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars.
Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A graceful and cogent analysis of the twists and turns of the culture of show business celebrity, taking in everybody from Elizabeth Taylor to Angelyne. You'll never look at "Entertainment Tonight" or read the Star quite the same way again." -- Kenneth Turan, film critic, Los Angeles Times

"Gamson . . . does not dismiss critics who see ours as a culture in thrall to image, personality and spin doctoring over substance, character and analysis. But he believes that our responses are varied and contradictory: that we treat celebrity like sport, a belief system, a trivial pursuit and an outlet for catharsis or criticism. . . . Engaging." -- New York Times

From the Inside Flap

"Gamson has brilliantly analyzed the complexities of celebrity as a cultural form. He gives us an insider's account, without going native. He provides us with a critical overview, without overlooking the messy details of celebrity-making and its central place in American society. Claims to Fame is a must for all those who seek to understand American public culture."--Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, author of The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life

"The most thoughtful and thoroughgoing sociological analysis I know of this strange and ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity. Intricately argued and elegantly written, frequently amusing and properly alarming, Claims to Fame deftly avoids either undervaluing or overvaluing the gullibility of the consumers of celebrity. Gamson--to use his own words--'mines . . . superficialities for their depths' and gives us more insight into the culture of entertainment than a dozen treatises on the 'resistant' potential of Madonna."--Todd Gitlin, University of California, Berkeley

"The best general account we have of the economic and representational parameters of contemporary celebrity. Claims to Fame would be worth reading simply for its lively and wonderfully detailed description of the 'celebrity industry' in Los Angeles. Yet, by tying this description to a compelling argument about the nature of our investment in celebrity images, the book does much more. It should have an important place in future discussions of the mass media and American culture."--Richard deCordova, DePaul University, author of Picture Personalities

"Insightful, well-written, replete with telling anecdotes, Claims to Fame demonstrates how one can critically analyze American culture without sneering at the American people."--Gaye Tuchman, author of Making News

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 270 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (March 2, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520083539
• ISBN-13: 978-0520083530
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #405,638 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born and raised--a Scorpio, naturally--in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then spent time in Israel, Boston, Berkeley, San Francisco, New Haven, New York City, and eventually landed back in the Bay Area. I went to college at Swarthmore, and got my PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley; I taught at Yale University for nine years, and now I teach at University of San Francisco. I married my partner, Richard Knight, in 2004, and we have two kids, Reba Sadie (b. 2006) and Madeleine Blanche (b. 2009).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars book review and brief analysis, March 14, 2008

By 

Juan-Carlos Henriquez (Boston College) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Paperback)

Claims to Fame.

What is at stake in the contemporary society of spectacle is the struggle for controlling the impact of the "signs of the real" (p. 7) over the mass of consumers and their possible resistance. The question of authenticity and realness has been present since the early celebrity consumer culture. Once a text is recognized as public and drowned into the flow of the social circulation, its ambivalence of being readable either in logical or mythological ways shapes it with an `inconvenient' edge; but in contemporary culture this problem is framed by the omnipresence and awareness of a third agent: the machine (p. 34) which is un-detachable from the celebrity-text. The industrial machinery increasingly is drawn into the narrative it produces, making the industrial process less a vehicle for the product and more a part of it, in a similar way as brands do to the commodities they label.

The still broadly accepted assumption in media studies stating that emancipation from authoritarian media depends on "demystifying" processes, achieving awareness by unveiling the machinery of production is challenged by Gamson when he demonstrates that alienation (production/consumer) is not overcome with information because information is immediately reconverted in entertainment. This finding invites further analyses to understand why and how Celebrity-watching audiences "bracket" evidence for the sake of maintaining their consumption not as endings but as instrumental mediations for their everyday ritualizations.

Audiences simultaneously play voyeuristic and performing roles (p. 139) making the axis of the watcher and the watched a superficial layer (a pre-text) "serving" underlying and ongoing conversations (both private and public).
A commonality in all sorts of interpretive communities is their joyful engagement in the decoding and reading of texts. Hermeneutic pleasures attired with playful attitudes are fully consonant with other meaning-making experiences where media consumption is used as a pre-textual resource, even in practices deemed as "serious" as religious practices . As seen with the "game players", there is an ability of decreeing at will the realness of an event, in spite of being acknowledged its fictitiousness. This contempt to what is real or fictional makes the former an irrelevant factor, as long as the story is kept as a sufficient resource for maintaining the social conversation. Hence, belief is self-consciously perceived as a matter of choice based on how much a belief suits ones' needs, since the text itself has no particular authority (p. 179).

Skepticism (truth and reality as undeterminable) is not a belligerent statement but a strategy to keep the conversation ongoing. In doing so, the text's original intention of being consumed as reliable information is subverted and reconverted into an ironic tool of resistance. The original alienation (the gap between the production and the consumer) and the implicit one-way communication model are not overcome, but this condition starts playing in favor of the consumers. In other words: consuming texts and playing games of truth with them reverse the dominating and objectifying relationship that traditionally texts exert upon readers, instead it is the reader the one who subjects the text in a way that what really matters is that the text doesn't really matter (p. 184). A social cognition implication of this is that open-coded consumption evidence a degree of distrust of the public and institutional selves (institutions of truth and social hypostasis, as Peter Berger likes to refer).
Juan Carlos Henriquez
PhD Program in Sociology
Boston College

5 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS book, February 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Paperback)

Sometimes when people read a book and then review it, the review reflects what it is that they wanted the book to say and do rather than what the book in fact sets out to say and do. (And when academics review a book, instead you get an essay on what they would say if they wrote the book. But they didn't, so back to the book at hand.) Gamson's treatment of celebrity is not Berger or Spengler's or anyone else's...it is his. And it is pretty good.

10 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars People immitating media immitating people, February 25, 1999

By 

Professor Joseph L. McCauley "Joseph L. McCauley" (Austria+Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Paperback)

This book is unapologetically about triviality. It begins with the rise of popularity of the trivial, illusion and fakery, in America since the time of P.T. Barnum. It is about the creators and consumers of illusion who replaced 'survivors' in after the transition to life in the megalopolis in America. John Berger has pointed out that zoos, stuffed animals, pets and eventually Disneyworld emerged as mankind became divorced from the fight to survive against nature, where animals were essential. The book does not explain why, in its appetite for illusion and triviality (consumerism, consumption of the media) America is so advanced with respect to Europe (the decline is there, if slower: the worst Hollywood films are extremely popular among Europe's youth). Gamson informs us of Holmes' expectation that photography would lead to the triumph of superficiality, and of Boorstin's description of the celebrity as a person who is well-known for his well-knownness. Political campaigns are accurately described as pre-packaged media affairs, where the participants have become game-players and the events themselves, like talk-shows, have become pseudo-events. People immitating the media immitating people. The future is trivial because trivial expectations determine the future via pre-packaged daily behavior. Gamson does not explain why we have evolved to this state of super-triviality, and why we seem to be stuck with it. This was more or less explained poetically by Spengler, and also poetically in still fewer words by John Berger, who informs us clearly and concisely on the subjects of Gamson's discourse: "It would ... be possible to talk of the 'homelessness' of the bourgeois with his town house, his country home, his three cars, his televisions, his tennis court, his wine cellar-it would be just possible, yet nothing about his class interests me, for there is nothing left to discover." Gamson's book is precisely about the people, and their admirors, about whom there is nothing worth discovering.