'Warhol': 'Celebritisation' as Human Branding

During his life and after his death, Andy Warhol was synonymous in arts circles with controversy and celebrity. In 1971 David Bowie sang "Andy Warhol, silver screen!" Warhol was the ‘pope of pop' and his iconic status continues to this day, long after his untimely death in 1987. The 1960s, that incipient era of McLuhan and the febrile mass-media eco-system, saw his visionary work transform our understanding of aesthetics, authenticity and art situated in the material culture of the everyday. Like others before him, he reminds us that the institutionalized gaze is dangerously myopic and disenfranchising. In this paper we draw on published accounts of Warhol's career and his rise to fame as the basis of developing an account of human branding as ‘celebritisation'. In doing so, we draw on consumer research, studies of celebrity and fame and published texts on Warhol's work and life

'Spinning' Warhol : celebrity brand theoretics and the logic of the celebrity brand

The paper takes as its subject celebrity and consumption and the cultural logic of the celebrity brand. It introduces the concept of celebritisation as the engine of celebrity culture, discussing ways in which celebrity brands operate as ‘map-making’ devices which situate consumers within networks of symbolic resources. We construct particulars via an investigative narrative that draws critically upon published accounts of the life and work of Andy Warhol, generating observations of signature practices and technologies of formation of Celebrity Brandhood. Within an inductive architecture we modulate to celebrity brands as transmediated marketing accomplishments which trade upon allure, glamour and charisma, constructed around rituals of transition, belonging, intimacy, and affect. We suggest that at the heart of the machinery of the cultural logic of the Celebrity Brand is the mediated spectacle as a field of social invention and transformation. In this way, the paper opens up pathways toward further interpretive analyses of celebrity brands, articulating the basis of accounts of Celebrity Brand Theoretics