The concept of an ‘anticelebrity’: a new type of antihero of the media age and its impact on modern politics

Abstract

Twenty-first-century politics have been defined by celebrity leaders such as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Barack Obama. How have ‘traditional’ politicians like ‘Mutti Merkel’, who embody the opposite of star status, still managed to compete with these celebrity politicians in an attention economy in which politicians continuously vie for media exposure? Scholarship on concepts such as ‘mediatisation’, ‘personalisation’, and ‘celebritisation’ explains the emergence of charismatic media personalities, but fails to explicate the success of ‘conventional’ politicians within systems of mediatised politics structured according to a celebrity logic. Based on an analysis of newspapers and both historical and contemporary political actors, this article argues that celebrity politics produced an antithesis, the ‘anticelebrity’. This political figure constitutes an ‘authentic’ alternative to the supposed mediatised ‘superficiality’ of celebrity politicians, but could not have the same appeal without the latter superficiality to contrast itself with. The text constructs an ideal type of the anticelebrity figure within different political and media systems, distinguishing between ‘reactionary anticelebrities’ and ‘natural anticelebrities’. By focussing on the anticelebrity concept, the article shows the photographic negative of the celebrity politician, which also enables us to see the contours of the notoriously blurred phenomenon of celebrity more distinctly.