Topic > The Basics of Celebrity Archaeology

Much ancient Greek sculpture is known only through Roman copies, with these types now filtered to us through successive millennia of reception, particularly since the Renaissance, so it is fitting that we now consider these classical forms through over a century of stellar bodies and other appropriations. The discovery of these layers of reception is a work of cultural archaeology, which looks through, beyond and under these forms to their precursors, and seeks to understand how these layers were formed by their past use, but also shaped for the present. Stars are always meant for the present, but they are inevitably products of the past and carry its patina. This quality of "pastness," to use Jameson's expression, is rendered in numerous ways, and it may involve placing a star in a landscape where the cadences of the past resonate with the lift of an arm, the turn of the head, and an inclination towards the contrapposto, like the historical poses, recalls the sculptural Venuses and Apollos, which model the famous bodies in the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the eighteenth century. Celebrity archeology is a valuable and playful way of considering the multiple layers of images and discourses of stars and how they engage current audiences with multiple overlapping references to the past. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Star images, most evidently those from previous decades with an overtly "divinizing" function, find the star embodying the past, its icons and a history of cultural and political appropriations, and yet contribute their distinct iteration to the iconographic process. Furthermore, the process does not end with the death of the star, for example Marilyn Monroe, because her image continues to act through every appropriation, in still, video or computer-generated images. Such appropriations are not passive, but deeply anchored in the work that she and her precursors put into her creative process. If one regards a star as a work of art as well as an industry, and has sometimes literally been presented as such, sculpture offers perhaps the best comparison to the other arts. Not only do the sculptural associations recall a great "high-cultural" history of venerated art, particularly classical sculpture, but they also offer a wealth of mythical types to appropriate, including that of Pygmalion and Galatea, an omnipresent metaphor since the 19th century for a desirable work of art that “comes to life.” Even in contemporary art, sculptors have been fascinated by the links between sculpture and photography. British sculptor Marc Quinn - best known for Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), which challenged preconceptions of both disability and "classical beauty", as well as Self (1991), supposedly cast his own frozen blood into the sculpture that represents a frozen moment.