La consommation de la célébrité

Abstract

The issue of consumption is usually conceived mainly as the consumption of commodities and, secondarily, of «cultural » goods (works of art, entertainment). The scope of this paper is to demonstrate that consumption also encompasses such an immaterial good as celebrity, nowadays widely and intensively invested through the phenomenon called «peopolisation ». This phenomenon has already been thoroughly investigated in English-speaking countries, but scarcely in France, and hardly according to market issues, since scholars used to address it rather according to moral and political issues, pertaining to value problems. Nonetheless celebrity generates through its consumption a specific economy, bounded to media, press, advertising, entertainment, security, etc. Available empirical data related to celebrity may be thus reconsidered according to this double perspective: celebrity as consumption, and consumption as consumption of celebrity.