It doesn’t have to be well-crafted, historically important or aesthetically unique. It simply needs to be famous.
Celebrity art is famous, with a story and thus emotional resonance. It’s a souvenir for our eyes, a chance to have proximity without ownership. It conflates familiarity with scarcity, the power of in-person experience with the context of our culture. It’s simultaneously a statement of status and a signifier of connection.
It shows up in more places than we realize. Once an egg cream joint is Instagram famous, the line out the door is yet another example of how much we want to be near something that others have noticed.
Plenty of art is good enough to qualify for celebrity. But celebrity only happens after the network has kicked in. It’s more random than we’d like to admit.
What would it take to make your art, in whatever form, worthy of celebrity?
