Name: From celebrities to influencers: A brief history of celebrity | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-04-23T04:36:42.000Z
Duration: 4 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You know, I want to be famous like the Kardashians

Fame, in its earliest forms, is some sense that

human beings need something beyond themselves.

So they almost invented gods as a way of explaining what happened next.

And, if there are gods, there's going to be contact with gods.

Some people are going to be closer to them than others.

still meant the celebration of the sacred.

The period where the nature of fame changed

from people attributing god-like qualities to it

And part of that is the sense of self-making

you do not have to be an aristocrat to be a person of fame.

We begin to enter into a situation where the people become celebrities.

He represents the cult of personality that we now know today.

His philosophy of life was that the point of life is self-realisation,

just as the point of art is self-expression.

You have to bring out what it is inside you.

were politicians, scientists, doctors, writers.

By 1920, it was singers, sportsmen, actors.

And the reason for that is the invention of film,

which gives you the illusion of being in touch with somebody

and close to them and forming bonds with them, without ever meeting them.

Warhol was at the time, in the 60s, creating this real buzz around him,

and creating this iconic figure that people flocked to.

And he certainly influenced the people and the scene around New York City.

with people who really influence the social scene today -

whether it might be somebody like Kim Kardashian,

and the followers that she has, who want to look like her physically.

There's a draw to wanting to be that figure,

Think about Warhol right now in this era that we live in

with everybody taking selfies and these images of themselves,

and thinking back to Warhol when he filmed himself eating a hamburger.

I mean, he was one of the pioneers of turning the camera on oneself.

Think about Andy Warhol now with an iPhone.

That would be the best Instagram account to follow, right?

Why so many people are attracted to celebrities

is that we live in an age of profound anxiety.

Part of that is wanting acceptance and approval in life.

Who are the people that have paid most to be accepted and approved?

Some people document their life, which means that they don't lie -

And some people create their life, so they actually stage a picture.

I think that this will be the difference between

You have to be real, because people will feel that

if it's not real and if it doesn't come from your heart

I strongly believe that the more you go into

the pieces of you that most people would hide,

the better of an influencer you are going to be.

The more you're sharing things that people are like,

That's when people get excited. That's when they want to follow you.

And it could just be that this smaller kind of fame -

this idea of finding your niche or your tribe -

smaller, individual acts of kindness and of love,