15 YEARS ago steve Jobs introduced THE first IPHONE, THE FIRST KARDASHIANs Show Aired and Britney Spears Shaved her head while paparazzi captured The most iconic breakdown of a popstar… the dawn of a new era of Attention.
“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything” Steve Jobs stated in January 2007, when he was introducing the world’s first iPhone. Jobs liked to use words such as “revolutionary” about his products, but the question is whether or not, in his wildest dreams, he could ever have imagined how apt his words about a phone that would change everything in the future, actually were? Smartphones are not only the fastest-selling gadget in history, they are also the gadget has changed virtually every aspect of our lives in the shortest amount of time, from work and leisure to self-identity, relationships, dreams and sleep.
FOMO - fear of missing out - is real and so is chasing fame: “I have 7850 likes, therefore I am “ as Donna Rockwell puts it in Phono Sapiens - The Slow Mammal On Speed: The spotlight shines in our eyes. Western culture praises what is on the outside, not the inner values. It is about how much attention we get, how much attention we can generate, how many likes we get on Facebook, how many retweets on Twitter, how many hearts pop up on our Instagram photos, etc. “
New technology has always shaped fame and culture. With smart technology celebrities became accessible to their fans, while also enabling more people to achieve fame and influence by always having a private audience in their pockets, not in its millions like for Britney Spears and the Kardashian sisters, but we are available and on-screen with everything from coffee drinking and dog walking to interior design, cooking, celebrations, walks in the rain, sunrises and sunsets.
The celebrity of the future
“In an era rife with unbelievability, here was another near-unbelievable moment: the reality-TV mogul Kim Kardashian meeting with the reality-TV mogul Donald J. Trump, at the White House—an “American Gothic” for the age of gaudy, late-capitalist spectacle,” Naomi Fry sates in The New Yorker article Kim Kardashian Meeting Donald Trump in the Oval Office Is a Nightmare We Can’t Wake Up From.
Currently, the Kardashian family is the most overexposed celebrity phenomenon in the USA. Kris Kardashian, the matriarch of the reality-dynasty in Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is known for being a strategic genius when it comes to reality television. She guided her daughters into becoming world famous celebrities – each targeting a specific segment and with the collective purpose of making money to becoming famous. They have sold everything from perfumes, front covers and computer games to – as of yet – the world’s most downloaded app.
It seems that for Kardashian family, scandals are just opportunities for spinning new business ideas. They are more than capable of improvising in order to recover successfully from a viral incident that could well have ended in a shit storm. When the second youngest Kardashian sister, Kendall, a highly sought-after high-end model often portrayed by the media as beautiful and perfect, was accused of having sex with her sister’s husband, it was the catalyst for – for want of better words – viral village gossip.
“Celebrities exist because people need to fantasise”
…said playwright Andrew Houston. And a rich family with five beautiful daughters in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, where only the richest of the rich live, shielded from the outside world in a secured celeb-community, is a good starting point for creating drama to keep those with prying eyes occupied.
Once upon a time, it was fictional series such as Dallas and The Bold & The Beautiful that caught the attention of viewers worldwide with their family dramas about the ridiculously rich. But in a time when competition between the various media has intensified, and where ordinary people have gained significant decision-making power when it comes to what famous peole are ‘in’ or ‘out’, dramas have to be ‘tweetable’. And that is made possible when those famous function as living narratives, depicting what is right and wrong for us. The constant interaction between the production of people as characters in a lavish ‘fairy tale’ placed on a pedestal on the one hand, and as people who do wrong and fall hard when they slip off the pedestal, generating content for attention-grabbing tabloids, for the series and for social media on the other.
The business model is ambivalence – it suits the media’s discourse – there is a constant exchange between the good cop and the bad cop: “they are extraordinary or just like us; they deserve their successes or they have just been lucky; we desire and imitate them or they provoke us to react with derision and contempt; they are genuine and down-to-earth or they are con artists”
Fame is not a static quantity. It is fleeting – what happens when consumers are no longer interested as fans or followers? It is the balance between idealisation and everyday actions that creates the perception of the pseudo-relationship that is crucial for maintaining attention.
Commercial value is conditioned by illusion
Even the most ordinary and seemingly insignificant situations – walking down the street with a cup of coffee, talking on a mobile phone and doing ‘normal’ things in general have the greatest novelty value. But everyday activities are only interesting if the contrast is intact, if a feeling of something extraordinary still exists. The illusion has to be present. If the distance between the viewer and the famous person reduces, the commercial value disappears. As Jessica Evans says in her book, Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity: “in order to maintain status and popularity, famous people are dependent on having a larger group who observe them from afar. Therefore, any charisma, which the celebrity possesses, is necessarily conditioned by the distance – a distance consisting of them performing only mediated appearances, albeit ones in which they are recognisable to the public. Thus, the famous person and their charismatic power are effectively conditioned by the absence of a face-to-face relationship”. If this is exceeded on one side, then the ideal is completely inaccessible, and it is only the few that survive (take, for instance, Kate Moss: a superstar who did not share (and has not shared) herself actively with the media – but rather has been seen fumbling around at night on the face of various gossip magazines. As a supermodel in the fashion industry, she sells a fantasy, and, therefore, her strategy of not being seen by us in everyday situations seems to work). But, on the other hand, if the star has become bland and has lost their magic, then the product is difficult to sell.
In Keeping Up with the Kardashians, there is an attempt to portray the family members as people of flesh and blood who have had to deal with bad (and crazy) habits, relationship difficulties and come out of crises – large and small, such as Bruce Jenner’s sex change, son- in-law Scott’s serious alcohol problems, divorces and so on. It is the gossip potential that accelerates the attention, and it is kept on a tight leash to ensure the magic and, thereby, the market value.
In one of the most famous episodes of the series, the family receives a stack of pizzas that include a love letter, addressed to the youngest daughter Kylie. After which Kris Kardashian panics and exclaims: “this is my personal space! It’s so creepy”. Kris Kardashian stands in her kitchen, freaking out that a stranger has invaded her private space, ‘private’ is perhaps a slight exaggeration, because about 3.3 million people, across the globe, are also ‘present’ and watching. “DOOOON’T EAT IT” she shouts in an anxious falsetto to her daughters as they begin to open pizza boxes.
There are some who believe that this pizza scene was artificial and was a brilliant example of organisational strategy to exploit the media’s ambivalent discourse. It does seem odd that one of America’s richest families does not have a security system to prevent such incidents, but, at the same time, chooses to allow it. Whether the scene was carefully selected due to its viral potential is difficult to say. But it shows the human reaction to the abstract and incomprehensible size of fame, and is precisely why it conveyed one of the many media storms the Kardashian family has been so incredibly famous for over the past seven years. And perhaps that is also why it was absolutely perfect that a fan sneaked their way into the Kardashian adventure via pizza?
Five years ago Ferrier celebrated the 10 years anniversary “10 years ago Britney Spears walked out of rehab and into Esther's Hair Salon in Los Angeles, grabbed a pair of clippers and shaved her head, citing the waiting paparazzi as motivation. Four months later the iPhone launched. The following month the first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians aired on US TV...” (Ferrier,The Guardian)
Exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in London to mark 10 years of the Kardashians’ reality TV show