Glossiness in Hyperreal Celebrity Portraiture

Abstract

One of the most noticeable aspects of consumer magazine covers — and indeed consumer media in general — is that they are sites in which celebrities are both constructed as such and made widely visible. Celebrities are both subjects and objects. Each celebrity is of course an individual human being who has achieved wide public recognition for a particular reason, such as exceptional sporting or creative talent. But celebrities are also immaterial commodities: their names and reputations are marketable and profitable objects to which a great deal of value (both economic and cultural) is attached. This chapter takes as its starting point an acknowledgement of the importance of celebrity to consumer culture. The question that it asks about magazine covers in particular is: what is it about the material characteristics of this media form that make it such a prominent site for the appearance of celebrity? And what can we learn about consumerist mediation in general from the material processes which construct the hyperreal world of celebrity on magazine covers? The argument made here is that the material elements of full-colour printing, smooth shiny paper and airbrushing combine to produce a core material dynamic of consumerist discourses which can be summarized as glossiness. The celebrity is but one, albeit a particularly powerful and common, media site in which glossiness manifests.