Philippa Snow on why celebrities should be considered fine art objects

Earlier this week (April 2), Forbes released their list of the world’s celebrity billionaires in 2024. Amidst already-known celebrity billionaires like Jay-Z and Kim Kardashian, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift joined the list in what Forbes described as an “amazing year for rich people”. Publications like The Cut joined in on the festivities, captioning their Instagram post on the topic “Taylor Swift is in her Billionaire Era.” It’s difficult, during times of war, mass starvation, and growing wealth inequality, not to feel enraged when stories like this go viral. While the cost of living crisis continues to cripple ordinary people, the rich are getting richer. As that dichotomy continues to exist, it’s easy to understand why individuals want to ignore celebrities or want the concept of celebrity to be abolished.

But how useful is it to just ignore them? The more we investigate why they are the way they are and how they elicit such visceral responses from us, the more we can empower ourselves to feel less envious of what they have and what we lack. “There is something self-abnegating about the desire to be a very famous person,” writes Philippa Snow in her thought-provoking new book Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object. “Requiring a saint-like level of devotion to personal transformation, sometimes extending to mutilation and self-sacrifice. In spite of authenticity supposedly being a quality that is prized in public figures, many of them only manage to perform it through the dissociative splitting of their minds.”

Part of MACK’s DISCOURSE series, Snow’s Trophy Lives questions whether celebrities can exist as more than just a muse to others; if they are, in fact, self-authored artworks in and of themselves. Rather than just blaming celebrities (stick with me), Snow presents thrilling arguments on the role we play as an audience in the construction of celebrities and the influence that has on their artistic creation of self.

Below, Snow discusses how beauty can make us lazy as critics, how writing this text challenged her preconceived notions about celebrities, and how race impacts the way celebrities construct themselves.

This may be an over-generalisation because I low-key hate celebrities, but I think it’s becoming more apparent that people (online anyway) hate celebrities, especially in the context of the cost of living crisis and the genocide in Palestine. Dazed readers never miss an opportunity to remind us of this in our IG comments, fervently encouraging us to ignore them. But Trophy Lives is an exploration of the celebrity as an art object, and it’s evident in your discussions of celebrities that you see these individuals as worthy of examination. Why is that, and what sparked your interest in this topic?

Philippa Snow: I’m glad you brought this up because, obviously, the length of time it takes to pitch, write and publish a book means that you are never certain which historical moment it will be born into, and seeing an image of a red carpet gown on the same social media feed as, for instance, a photograph of a dead Palestinian child certainly throws into sharp relief how little famous people matter in the widest possible context. When over two million people are on the verge of starvation in Gaza, who cares who’s using Ozempic in Hollywood, you know?

That caveat aside: whether or not you or I as individuals are interested in them, celebrities are an enduring phenomenon, and part of the continuation of that phenomenon is of course for the sake of escapism, because the world at large is so full of terrible cruelty. Like everyone else who leaves their home and has access to the internet, I’ve spent my life ambiently surrounded by these people, and I guess the book is about trying to find a new way of understanding them and what they do for their fans. The notion that they’re ‘just like us’ but also, paradoxically, better and more important at the same time is fascinating to me because it means that merely by existing, they’re doing what fine art is meant to do: they’re taking things we feel and experience and heightening them into something almost abstracted and symbolic, and then reflecting them back at us.

I loved your observation about celebrities and artworks not being taken seriously enough when they’re beautiful. The example you used was about Jude Law, who got much more interesting acting roles when his hair began to thin and his eyes crinkled. Why do you think beauty makes us lazy as consumers and critics? 

Philippa Snow: I think we associate beauty with a certain emptiness: life is obviously more frictionless for people who meet traditional beauty standards, so we think of them as playing it on easy mode and thus as not having much depth. Also, perhaps we don’t like to imagine them as cunning. There’s this idea that ‘God doesn’t give with both hands’, as I’ve seen people put it, and that you can’t be gorgeous and smart – or, if not smart, then savvy. But savviness is the reason a lot of these individuals have made it and the reason they have such well-refined public images. There are plenty of very hot people who aren’t A-Listers or, well, Kardashians.

Did writing this extended text challenge your preconceptions about celebrities?

Philippa Snow: It altered the way I think about celebrities because it becomes much harder to compare yourself to these people once you start really taking notice of all the construction, all the graft, that goes into that illusion of perfection. It becomes easier to see that they are merely providing a service by working on themselves in that manner, whether it’s a service we personally appreciate or not. And it’s a big, often lifelong commitment! I think there was something weirdly freeing about accepting the pursuit of these aesthetics as something totally alien, totally separate from me – as extreme and as durational as what performance artists are doing in galleries.

We love to talk about celebrities setting unrealistic beauty standards, but in Trophy Lives, you don’t stop at that argument. You highlight how, before Instagram, we were inundated with unflattering images of celebrities on nights out drunk or high through sites like TMZ. Instagram gave them space to carefully curate their images and become flawless. Can you speak more about Instagram’s impact on transforming celebrities into artists and art objects?

Philippa Snow: I came of age in the 00s, which was the era of size zero and also of the birth of TMZ, which meant an explosion of tabloid material that showed celebrities – if we’re honest, primarily female celebrities – in the most unflattering light possible. Obviously, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing from the media at large since then about this period of time, but it was… unedifying to live through, to say the least. When I think of the effect watching all that play out had on me as a resolutely unfamous teenager living in a bungalow in Bournemouth, I find it easy to understand the allure for them of a new platform that allowed them to beam images of themselves looking exactly as they’d like into people’s homes.

Celebrities have always worked with magazines and photographers, but I don’t know if they’ve ever had a more direct connection with fans than they’ve had since the advent of image-driven social media. MySpace existed first, sure, but Instagram has always had this sheen of polished aspiration around it, and being directly connected to the user’s phone made it easier to project a degree of intimacy and immediacy. It encourages you to be the author of your own image in a very particular way.

Do you still think Instagram has the same impact today in myth-making for this new generation of celebrities? People like Zendaya or Timothée Chalamet use the app infrequently compared to the Kardashians back in the day.

Philippa Snow: I have thought about this. It’s now getting quite chic and enviable to not be on social media at all. I wonder whether young stars not using Instagram is partly to do with the way that we’re all so much more aware of the possibilities of image manipulation now, especially in the context of ‘candid’ photos, so the advantages it used to provide are no longer as evident. It’s also not the ‘youngest’ social media platform anymore, which isn’t something I can speak about with much authority because I’m in my thirties. Maybe also, Instagram circa 2024 is too much about making regular people into microcelebrities, and as such, it’s lost its glamour for the freshest members of the A-list. Maybe the next trend will be being utterly reclusive and mysterious – call it Garbo-core.

I found your discussion about race and how it intersects with art objects fascinating. You highlight how Andy Warhol transformed himself through plastic surgery, white-blonde wigs and a name alteration to be the ‘right’ kind of white and arguably a more desirable celebrity and piece of art. Can you speak more about how race impacts how celebrities construct themselves for an audience?

Philippa Snow: This is a subject that would more easily lend itself to another 20,000-word essay than an answer in a Q&A, but the short way of addressing it is to say that it certainly has an enormous impact. Who we elevate to the position of the A-list has a lot to do with who we – and when I say ‘we’, I’m talking about the culture in the broadest possible sense – believe is beautiful, and believe is the ‘right’ kind of person to be placed in the public eye. Because of the world we live in, that typically means people who are white, cis, able-bodied, and with a body that fits one of a few types: thin, very fit, or curvaceous in a very specific way. That’s changing, but it’s changing slowly, and not always in a completely linear fashion.

For instance, I talk a bit in the book about Kim Kardashian and the ongoing discussion around her adoption of physical characteristics that, due to these narrow white-supremacist ideas about beauty, have been treated as undesirable traits when seen on the bodies of Black women, and yet have become ‘trends’ once Kim has displayed them. Again, as with looking at the artificiality of the way celebrities construct themselves in general, I think the more we consider the arbitrariness and the abject fucking stupidity of a beauty standard that elevates whiteness above everything else, the better. It’s like looking behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz – hopefully, the illusion starts to fall to pieces.

Trophy Lives is published by MACK and is available for purchase now.