Ellis Cashmore - Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century

Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...47

KARDASHIAN KULTURE

SocietyNow

SocietyNow: short, informed books, explaining why our world is the way it is, now.

The SocietyNow series provides readers with a definitive snapshot of the events, phenomena and issues that are defining our twenty-first century world. Written by leading experts in their fields, and publishing as each subject is being contemplated across the globe, titles in the series offer a thoughtful, concise and rapid response to the major political and economic events and social and cultural trends of our time.

SocietyNow makes the best of academic expertise accessible to a wider audience, to help readers untangle the complexities of each topic and make sense of our world the way it is, now.

The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016
Peter Kivisto

Becoming Digital: Towards a Post-Internet Society
Vincent Mosco

Understanding Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union
Graham Taylor

Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them
Katrin Tiidenberg

Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online
Crystal Abidin

Corbynism: A Critical Approach
Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts

KARDASHIAN KULTURE

How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century

BY

ELLIS CASHMORE

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2019

Copyright 2019 Ellis Cashmore. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78743-707-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-706-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-964-1 (Epub)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My work with Jamie Cleland and Kevin Dixon, in Screen Society, along with my solo books Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption, and Making Sense of Sports, have informed several passages of this book.

CHAPTER 1

MIRACULOUS ENGAGEMENT

You probably havent heard of Dorje Mingma. He was a Nepalese Sherpa assisting a Swiss expedition to climb Mount Everest. On October 31, 1952, he was killed by falling ice and buried in the windless basin known as the Valley of Silence. Dorje Mingma was the last mountaineer to die trying to climb Everest, before the alp was finally conquered in the following year by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, whose names are much more familiar.

Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007. The comparison may be tenuous, but the last person to fail and perish before an acclaimed triumph is usually forgotten. Smith was a Playboy centerfold, a model for Guess Jeans, occasional actor, diet products endorser and sometime reality show star who was nearly-but-not-quite famous for being famous.

Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Mexia, Texas in 1967, she married at 17 and had a son. Her idol was Marilyn Monroe. Working as a pole dancer at Gigis, a strip club in Houston, in 1991, she caught the eye of a customer, who, according to Forbes (March 4, 2013), offered her $4,000 a month for consulting. He was J. Howard Marshall II, a recently widowed oil billionaire. In 1994, the uncommon couple married; he was 89 and Smith was 26. Within 14 months, Marshall was dead, leaving behind an estate valued at $1.6 billion.

Smith made no secret of her desire to be at the center of public scrutiny. Once asked if the generous media coverage she received after her relationship with Marshall became known bothered her, she laughed: Oh, no, I like it I love the paparazzi. They take pictures and I just smile away. Ive always liked attention.

This probably gave away her game: she practically invited the media into her life, rarely missing the chance to turn a photo opportunity into a fiasco; shed guzzle champagne from the bottle, flash her ample breasts and behave amorously with both women and men. Her exhibitionism knew no bounds. And the plot in which she featured made onlookers indignant or sympathetic, but probably not much in-between; she was what we often call a divisive figure someone who causes disagreement between people. Of course, this made her a great narrative: blonde, white-trash gold-digger, who parties like an airstrike, splattering anyone in range, drops lucky and marries one of the richest men in America months before he croaks.

Even better, in 2002, the E! network capitalized on what was then the embryonic new TV genre, the reality show, by launching The Anna Nicole Show. This chronicled the minutiae of her everyday life, like visiting the dentist and feeding her dog, Sugar Pie, Prozac. The series ended in 2004. Smith also featured in advertisements for TrimSpa, a diet supplement. In 2006, she gave birth to a daughter and, in a dreadful twist of fate, Smiths son from her first marriage died while visiting her and the new baby in the Bahamas. Cause of death: lethal interaction of methadone and antidepressants.

A long-running legal case seesawed until 2006 when the US Supreme Court ruled in a way that appeared to open the way for Smith to receive over $450 million from her ex-husbands estate, though she died on February 8, 2007, from an accidental overdose, without seeing a penny. In June the same year, Paris Hilton started her prison sentence. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about her. She was Hillary to Smiths Mingma; everybody knows the former, but not many remember the latter, who came close, but failed.

Smith was ahead of her time not by much, but enough to prevent her capitalizing on the new fascination for celebrities. She embodied all the basic or intrinsic qualities of the new type of celebrity. But in the mid-1990s, there were no reality TV shows (at least not by that name), nor the promotional apparatus to handle putatively talentless personalities and no public with sufficient curiosity to become ensorcelled by someone who appeared to be just a Marilyn manqu. Then, a butterfly flapped its wings and set in motion a connecting sequence of events that delivered seismic activity.

________________________________________

When in 2003 Barbra Streisand learned that an aerial photograph of her California beach house was among 12,000 pictures uploaded to the internet as part of a collection, she did what any self-respecting Academy Award-winning artist, with ecstatically reviewed Broadway and West End shows, more number one albums than any other woman and over 50 million records sold, would do: she sued. After all, she was

Next page

1234567...47

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century»

Look at similar books to Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Lisa Idzikowski

Celebrities in Politics

Kim McNamara

Paparazzi: Media Practices and Celebrity Culture

Barrie Gunter

Celebrity Capital: Assessing the Value of Fame

Jeffress Lynn

The invention of celebrity: 1750-1850

Cashmore

Beyond black celebrity and race in Obamas America

Andrea McDonnell

Celebrity: A History of Fame

Carol M. Madere

Celebrity Media Effects: The Persuasive Power of the Stars

Gayle Stever

The Psychology of Celebrity

Ellis Cashmore

Screen Society

Felix Harcourt

Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s

Halperin Ian

Kardashian dynasty : the controversial rise of Americas royal family

Frankie Taylor

101 Amazing Kim Kardashian Facts

Discussion, reviews of the book Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.