As a celebrity commentator, I must take this moment to lament my pathetic professional status. In the pantheon of journalistic endeavors, writing about celebs is akin to being a busboy at a high-class Manhattan restaurant, slopping up filthy grease while "superior" counterparts in the kitchen craft exquisite haute cuisine.
This sad-sack fate in life was illuminated in a recent piece by New York Magazine writer Matt Zoller Seitz. In an otherwise stellar piece about the downfall of high-quality, fairly paid journalism, he had this to say about the onslaught of celebrity commentary:
[It] is ultimately just that old hooker Gossip wrapped in the shiny fake fur coat of undergraduate sociology ("What our Fascination with Justin Bieber Says About Us").
Ouch. As someone who has written about Bieber not once, not twice, but three times (yikes!), these words cut deep. And on some level, I understand what Seitz is saying. The Internet is rife with celebrity content, and it generally tends to fall into one of two camps: breathless, exclamation point-riddled gossip, or vapid listicle shamelessly designed to drive up clicks.
But this kind of content is different from that which serves as insightful, critical commentary. I'm not claiming I always hit that mark, but that is at least the intent. And there are any number of brilliant people who frequently uncover deeper meanings behind "trashy" celeb culture, from Vanity Fair's sublime Vanessa Grigoriadis to Linda Holmes of NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour." Must any writing about celeb-dom be craven clickbait similar in nature to the tacky coat of a prostitute?
In fact, I would argue that it's precisely the absurdity and vapidness of celeb worship that makes it worth commenting on in the first place. Quality journalistic analysis is designed to make us question the underbelly of mainstream institutions. Celeb culture certainly qualifies as a mainstream facet of modern society. And insofar as it leads us down a rabbit hole of meaningless fascination, while distracting us from more pressing issues of the day, it does have an underbelly worth exploiting.
Beyond that, the genre can reveal much about human pathology and social forces, asking us to confront significant issues such as race or female sexuality. It is not, in other words, all listicles or breathless gossip, and it doesn't deserve to be treated as the bastard of "real" journalism.
Then again, I'm just a lowly celebrity writer. So I probably just wrote this post for clicks.
Image: flickr.com
