First, does the importance created by the media, then replicated endlessly through online platforms, accurately depict importance and cultural meaning, specifically when focused on place and space? Second, how does this notoriety, especially in death, of identity, scope, time and event affect memory, nostalgia, and, ultimately, consumerism? Most importantly, do the gaps between created and actual reveal a simultaneous desire for authenticity in a marketplace of fabrication? Euro-American society has placed a higher value than ever before on personal attachments to dead stars. These have been made easier, faster and more immediate through technology – while becoming further and more quickly alienated from the original text created by the individuals through the very same mediations. Consumer driven behaviour and materiality fill the breach in the search for identity and meaning via distribution and replication. These actions provide a vehicle for illustrating mass culture’s framing, valuing, of a legitimacy only accomplishable through death, and fetishising the passing, allowing for the (often expected) transformative behaviours as a ‘new’ meaning for the dead is created, circulated and evolved in ways often far removed from the orig- inal text and ideas. In this manner, death gives birth a ‘fresh’ (id)entity, alienated from the original, one caught in a perpetual cycle of entropy.
As Fred Vermorel (1985: 250) states, ‘Our world is so steeped in celebrity values and saturated by the celebrity systems that no excess, no absurdity, no subversion seems to effectively challenge it. Every challenge is absorbed and normalised, then recycled’. John Castles (1993: 170) echoes these thoughts, stating, ‘Living stars are a subset of dead ones’.
大概介绍了authentic，认为说摇滚明星的死亡证实了他们所表达的痛苦的真实性，同时死亡使这种痛苦永久保存下来。因此实际上摇滚明星的死是一种大众愿意看到的结局，这种对死亡的宣扬与商业化运作，使真实中也同样包含包含着虚假与不真诚。This is just one of the many ways value, signs and symbols have been bastardised, even dramatically transformed, to fit into an accelerated culture of consumerism and technology, making any stable or clear idea of either the true ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ not only difficult to discern and define but nearly impossible to pin down and clearly see.
*吐槽：因为不在英语环境里而且阅读的东西实在是不多，不知道是文科生调用理科术语是世界通则，还是我以为的理科术语原本就是常用词*
从引文中找到两段觉得有意思的东西来自Jean Baudrillard, Simulations：
And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.
The old slogan ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.
happy puppy 