The eight artists in the exhibition have examined different aspects of celebrity, and probed various characteristics of these phenomena including the role celebrity’s play in society today, self-promotion and media promotion, and aspirations for fame and celebrity status.
Devonport regional gallery original venue
In the essay, Fifteen Minutes, David Malouf compares old-fashioned
fame, built upon reputation and established over time, with
contemporary fame gained in an instant. Malouf calls this version of
fame, celebrity. Celebrities are the new deities –‘sacred monsters’ or
demi-gods of a modern society where celebrity worship is the new
religion. Malouf believes that celebrities are mythologised; they become
idols that play out a ‘tragi-pathetic public show’ for a world hungry for
meaning.
This obsession with fame is represented in New Deities: art and the cult
of celebrity as eight contemporary artists explore notions of the celebrity
with particular reference to the mass media and the internet.
The exhibition touches on a range of issues related to the allure and
zealous devotion to celebrities. While organised religion may appear to
be in decline, celebrity worship continues to gain momentum. Pop
culture and the mass media, at times seemingly a single entity, appears
to have a life of its own, growing and forming in response to the images
that feed the machine. Even the banal act of a celebrity drinking coffee
or buying groceries is considered news worthy. It seems that society has
an insatiable appetite for these images, which are the stock in trade of a
growing industry eager to feed the consumer.
Catherine Wolfhagen
Curator, May 2007
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