idolization of stars

As I was writing my discussion essay on the groupie phenomenon, it became difficult to escape the question of why we need celebrity status anyway. It's been said for years and I still think it as I pluck wet laundry from the machine, why do we push the most necessary components of our society to the bottom of the social strata and lift up those whose contribution to society is little or none? Why do we ostracize those who are making the truest, hardest working art and the most basic, necessary everyday items? Little kids are making our shoes and getting paid nothing and middle-aged actresses are raking in a fortune designing perfumes. We need shoes. We don't need perfume and Dockers and reality TV and tee-shirts and imitation hair and crab meat. So how come we give the people that make those things not only all our money but also all of our respect and most of our dignity too? And how come these same middle-aged actresses are also making a bundle off of "novels" about self-discovery and nose jobs while writers trying to make statements about humanity or sex or something that matters to them are rotting in cold-water apartments eating two-dollar cans of pasta?

I guess you could argue that it doesn't matter. Society, though it must suffer art, is completely divorced from it in terms of economy and sometimes common sense. And those people aren't really doing it for the money anyway. That would be selling out. So the people who want to make money make it, and the people who want to make art make that. Everyone's happy, right?

Except I guess what I'm trying to get at is the relationship between the population and celebrities. It goes deeper than just making money. It's about taking a step back and being truly baffled. Why do we idolize stars, or anybody for that matter? Because we, perhaps, would like to be more like them, we want to improve ourselves so we use others as role models. What I'm curious about is that true divide between common sense and art-making, something I've been trying to attack from various different angles for a long time. Treated delicately that tenuous divide/relationship can be pleasant beyond compare, but when exploited without thought it leads to terrible things. We rip young women with beautiful voices from their showers and throw them in front of an audience. We no longer value her talent. We have forgotten the girl who made us shiver with her vibrato by the time she's been cast in her first play.

We no longer want her talent or even her body. I talked in my discussion essay about how sex has become an entity outside of itself with no real definition but a kind of hovering sense of evil. Fame has become like that especially so. We don't want to look good in a floor-length evening gown, we don't want to look good in a bikini, we don't even want to look good naked, we just want to look good: but we would look horrible in rhinestone t-shirts, g-strings and extensions. We would be less happy getting drunk on a couch and getting fake tans in front of a TV camera than we are just being who we are.