Are Celebrities Embarrassing?

On sell outs, celebrity brands, and authenticity

Another day, another celebrity has launched a mocktail brand.

How many celebrity brands can we take? How many more ads featuring a once respected actor can we watch? How many “documentaries,” in which a pop star curates their vulnerability, can we endure? How much more of this can we stomach?

It’s gotten to the point where it feels like celebrities will do anything for a buck. The word cringe is thrown around a lot, but this truly is cringe.

Remember the days when celebrities felt such shame around selling out that if they did an ad they would only do it in Japan so no one in the western world would find out? Well they shed that shame pretty fast. The flood gates have well and truly opened, celebrities are totally shameless now.

Brigitte Bardot Paparazzi photo

And it’s made the world of celebrity feel kind of embarrassing. Every day they seem more out of touch, more inauthentic, more greedy.

The average celebrity persona today feels like it was crafted in a lab by a PR team, stylist, and manager to optimize their social media reach and marketability. They are so carefully curated, so media trained, so styled. They never answer a question straight. I’m sure there’s a person in there somewhere, but we’ll never get to see them. Selling out seems to have set into their bones.

They distract us with big set designs, new hair cuts, elaborate outfits, and leotards. Make us think they’re making a statement by wearing something provocative, but in reality they’re probably just an ambassador for whatever brand made their outfit. It all keeps us talking about them, without them ever really having to say or do anything interesting.

I’d guess this shift mainly stems from social media, the direct line celebrities have to their fans gave them the ability to cash in on them. It gave them far more control of their audience, quantified their reach. And that made them so much more powerful.

But I would also argue that this is the result of art, music, and film being reduced down to free “content” in the age of streaming. When a musician can no longer rely on just album and ticket sales to make them rich, at some point they’ll become a billboard or start a makeup line if it’s more profitable. If less artistic films are being made, actors will eventually start doing ads and massive blockbusters.

When our most successful creatives, are beholden to corporations and their marketing teams, culture suffers. When a celebrity is reliant on investors and sponsors, when they become a spokesperson, they become far more limited in what they can do creatively. They have to be more careful about what they say, be more widely palatable. They can’t piss people off, take too many risks, be weird.

It ends up changing the type of people that can even become famous. Someone like Lou Reed, famously an asshole, probably wouldn’t be interested in selling Nespresso pods. Bob Dylan would likely be too strange and evasive to be a Gucci ambassador. Patti Smith probably wouldn’t be great in a Pepsi ad. But that didn’t matter back then, all they had to do was make music enough people liked to sell albums and tickets. In this world, maybe they wouldn’t sustain a career. Maybe they wouldn’t have even been given the chance.

Miss Piggy

So the actors and musicians that thrive most in this world, are those that are able to get the brands deals. No wonder so many of our most famous celebrities are former child stars, they’ve been coached for this since birth. They know how to toe the line.

I think people are starting to feel weary of it all. There is an increasing air of inauthenticity surrounding so many celebrities, and it’s starting to reek. Every new alcohol brand, makeup line, or ad they do, makes fans feel a little more used. Every interview they do where they wear a cooky outfit but won’t say anything interesting or serve us anything creatively worthwhile, grates on us more. While the rest of us feel the effects of a cost of living crisis, they’re becoming billionaires and still trying to sell us shit. In such a tumultuous time, they somehow seem to have less to say than ever.

Culture is cyclical though, it ebbs and flows. The pendulum will always swing back. And I think we’re at that point. It feels like we’re looking for a different type of celebrity now. A musician like Mk.gee or a band like Geese is finding wider success. Notably more stripped back, less styled. They don’t have crazy stage design, costumes. They remind me of musicians from a time gone by. Young actors like Mikey Madison and her peers are shying away from even having social media accounts. They’re not so quick to do a blockbuster franchise. In this world that fits the tone, it reads as more authentic, more restrained.

But it will be interesting to see how celebrities can manage to maintain an air of authenticity in this new world. At the end of the day, if it’s increasingly difficult to make money purely from art and creative work alone, is selling out just an eventuality? Will they just have to be more strategic about it? Can true authenticity come back or will it just be an aesthetic?

Ultimately, if art and creative work continues to serve in culture as merely “content,” then this problem will persist. If the world gets more and more expensive and creative pursuits pay less and less, I think selling out becomes an existential problem

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