Bey­once, Becks and me me me — smh.com.au

Just a quick link. I’d love it if the news­pa­per actu­ally pro­vided links to the var­i­ous papers men­tioned. I’m no huge fan of the “celebrity as an object of study” thing, but snip­pets of this arti­cle stir [my] interest.

The only parts of any value to me in this arti­cle are in rela­tion to the con­nec­tion between media focus and our soci­ety — sur­mised in two short quo­ta­tions from the piece:

Explain­ing how Beckham’s career has been lit­tered with Chris­t­ian sym­bol­ism, Brick said redemp­tion, res­ur­rec­tion, and sal­va­tion “are the nar­ra­tives that tell his story”. The footballer’s per­cep­tion of him­self seems to con­cur: he has appeared in mag­a­zines adopt­ing a Christ-like pose, has a cru­ci­fix tat­too and named one of his sons Cruz, Span­ish for cross.

But Brick’s paper said read­ing Beck­ham as post­mod­ern reli­gious icon, a new god of the global con­sumer cul­ture, was insuf­fi­cient. “Rather, Beckham’s celebrity speaks to the para­dox­i­cal desire to attribute mean­ing in a cul­ture which is increas­ingly defined as meaningless…”

Paul McDon­ald, from Roe­hamp­ton Uni­ver­sity in Eng­land, pointed out that at the start of last cen­tury, press pro­files con­cen­trated on polit­i­cal, busi­ness and reli­gious lead­ers, “yet by the 1920s, the focus of that atten­tion had shifted toward cov­er­age of fig­ures in enter­tain­ment or sports”. The media’s atten­tion had moved from the idols of pro­duc­tion towards idols of consumption.

Still, it’s worth read­ing the whole arti­cle to con­tex­tu­alise those snippets.