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02/18/2004 Archived Entry: "Celebritacy"

Celebritacy.
Thanks to a link found at Cup Of Chica (to the left), I came across the American Library Association using celebrities to promote literacy.

Excellent. But following the way the rhetoric of cool perceives the role of celebrity within literacy (borrowed heavily from Greil Marcus' Dead Elvis), I have to say that it's not enough to just have celebrities asking kids to read. Print literacy really isn't the issue (or entirely the issue) anymore. Digital culture changes the rules of what "literacy" consists of. What the ALA does demonstrate, though, is the need to understand and acquire celebritacy. Celebritacy is the usage of celebrity for making meaning. Celebritacy is a direct result of technology and mass-reproduction (see Benjamin and Warhol).

The Dead Elvis assignment I used to teach is a good example of celebritacy. How does Elvis become a grammar, a rhetoric, a way to critique, a way to understand various cultural issues? Marcus does a good job with Elvis; students generalize from the Marcus example and choose another figure to work with. Because celebrity imagery (textual and visual) appears in a variety of contexts and applications, collage becomes an appropriate medium for demonstrating celebritacy. Celebritacy is best performed through the collage.

So, these ALA ads need to be redone.

We don't want a poster of Weird Al. We want a collage of various usages of Weird Al. And we want it done by the students who are being asked to acquire celebritacy.