Celebrity’s histories

This chapter examines the four different approaches to celebrity's history in reverse order, starting with the writers emphasizing the nineteenth century as the point of origin, then going backwards to the eighteenth century, the sixteenth century and then the twelfth century. The central historical concept in Daniel Boorstin's account was what he called 'the Graphic Revolution': the period from around the mid-nineteenth century where there was a massive expansion in the US in the capacity to create and disseminate images as well as information. The realm of visual culture and the creators of images also played an increasingly important role in the celebrity production process, because of improvements and a lowering of costs in the mass reproduction of visual material such as portraits. The realms of the court and the monarchy and the mechanisms of the absolutist state were a crucial source of the theatricalization of society, driven by the performative dynamics of political power.