Is it time for the celebrity era to die? No.

Celebrity. We are all familiar with the concept. Someone who is widely known for something/nothing and attracts an unprecedented amount of interest into the inane details of their private lives.

Gossip websites, magazine Heat magazine

s, television and the internet have created an entire industry dedicated to giving the public unprecedented access to what goes on behind closed doors of these public figures. Or what goes on in the supermarket. Or at the hairdressers. Or in the park walking a dog.

Tanya Gold’s column in the 20^th July issue of Stylist states “it is time for the era of celebrity to die”.

She reckons there have been “too many headlines about sex lives, and too many ruined lives.”

She rightly states that if you don’t want to be famous, you don’t have to be. If you never talk to the press they will never have anything to print. Even if at first you are hounded eventually they will get bored and focus their attention on the next ‘big thing’ who is so hungry for a headline they purposefully go without underwear, creating the perfect shot of an ‘accidental flash while wearing a short skirt and clambering out of a taxi’.

Wonder why Madonna is rarely photographed in London? She wears very uninteresting outfits.

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Heard of Steve Coogan? Yes you have. Because he talks to the press, sleeps with famous women with famous reputations for entertaining the public with details of her sex life.

But Beyonce and Jay-Z are rarely in the ‘are they on/off?’ pages of gossip magazines because they never talk publicly about their relationship.

These superficial aspects of our culture I believe provide us with much needed light-hearted entertainment.

As human beings we are nosy. We gossip and we bitch. The celebrity industry is exactly this. The only difference is that instead of gossiping about the next door neighbour over a cup of tea, we gossip about people everybody in the entire country knows and this gossip is then published.

The ruined lives Tanya Gold touches upon is strange. I suspect she has confused ‘celebrity’ with ‘members of the public subject to criminal acts of tabloid newspapers’.

Fame is a never ending circle that the celebrities being hounded and bored members of the public regularly complain about. Yet we still carry on consuming it and they still carry on giving interviews and creating photo opportunities.

The era of celebrity is not over.

This article was originally published on Rhian's blog

Is it time for the celebrity era to die? No.

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