Art Vs. Fame
by Kacey Byczek

"... and I'll take my clothes off / And it will be shameless / 'Cause everyone knows / that's how you get famous," declares British pop star Lily Allen in "The Fear," the first single off her sophomore album It's Not Me, It's You. She later goes on to lament that "[l]ife's about film stars / And less about mothers/ It's all about fast cars / And cussing each other."

Allen isn't the only artist to express the sentiment that the western world's fascination with fame is quickly replacing its appreciation for talent. Weezer ("Troublemaker"), the Arctic Monkeys ("A Certain Romance" and "Teddy Picker," to name a couple) and even Britney Spears ("Piece of Me") are among the scores of artists who have, perhaps ironically, manipulated their fame to address these issues.

Allen and her peers are not simply acting as narcissists; their concerns are real. With the help of the paparazzi and gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton, going to see a movie or buying a record is both more expensive and time-consuming than Googling a performer's name. Yet, while there appears to be a consensus that 'art for art's sake' is an endangered ideal, the army of "art poachers" is increasing at an exponential pace, and an appropriate solution is still nowhere in sight. While some, like Allen, use their art to address the issue, others confront it in ways that look hypocritical at worst and naïve at best.

MTV aired Britney Spears: For the Record on November 30th, 2008. Meant to be an 'uncensored' exposé into the singer's personal life, the documentary followed Spears around for 30 days, starting the afternoon of the 2008 Video Music Awards. Much of the ninety-minute run-time was dedicated to showing viewers how sad it is that she is stalked by paparazzi and smeared in tabloids and on gossip blogs. Instead of coming away from it looking like a victim though, the special made Spears (and director Phil Griffin) look slightly stupid. Spears, rather than releasing a statement through a publicist or speaking to a magazine, chose to be followed by a camera in order to show how being following by cameras led to her breakdown. In order to show fans that the music is what matters to her, she enlisted the help of Music Television, a channel that has long been criticized for turning artists, rather than their videos, into a spectacle. It all makes believing Spears' claim that she wants to be 'normal' almost impossible.

In June of 2008, months before Britney Spears: For the Record aired, MTV began a project with Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz. FNMTV Premieres, a weekly sixty-minute program hosted by Wentz dedicated to airing new music videos, was advertised as an attempt to increase the amount of music played on the channel. Slowly,though, Wentz's hosting turned into another opportunity to talk about his marriage to then-expectant Ashlee Simpson. Friends including Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes, a band signed to Decaydance, the record label owned and operated by Wentz, acted as 'celebrity judges' for the videos being premiered.

As FNMTV took shape it became, like everything in Wentz's life, less about the music and more about his notoriety. Unlike Spears though, whose media personality was somewhat constructed by the tabloids, Wentz's willingness to let others peer into his personal life has always been his doing. Maybe that is what is to be expected, though, from the man who called a song "Fame < Infamy."

Perhaps, though, instances like Wentz's rise from pop star to celebrity are exactly the reason why there is no solution to the problem. So many musicians and actors rely on name recognition these days, and gossip blogs and tabloids work to make them household names. For those who read the publications, the more outrageous and infamous a person becomes, the more entertaining the stories are. It seems that these days, no matter how hard performers try to keep their lives private, something about them gets reported on a blog.

Maybe the reason behind this is that obsessing over stars' lives has become a form of entertainment separate from the art itself. Celebrities are no longer afforded the luxury of being ordinary; their every word is a song, every move a performance. For now, it seems that so long as there are videos of Amy Winehouse smoking crack on the internet, some people will not feel the need to listen to her sing about struggling with addiction. While Lily Allen's fight with Katy Perry is well-publicized on Perez Hilton's blog, there will be people who are not compelled to listen to her fight against what the world has become in It's Not Me, It's You.

A celebrity's every move has become an act in a grand performance. Celebrities' personal lives are the new music, the new cinema. They are the newest form of amusement, and reports on them unfortunately aren't disappearing anytime in the near future.