Art and Celebrity Culture
- Submitting institution
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University of South Wales / Prifysgol De Cymru
: A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Output identifier
- 4846465
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- MAC Birmingham; Arquipélago, centro des artes contemporaneas, Sao Miguel, the Azores
- Open access status
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- Month of first exhibition
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- Year of first exhibition
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research extends Durden’s investigation, with the artists’ group Common Culture, into celebrity and the processes of commodification within popular culture. It also provides a critical reflection on the work of one of the most celebrated contemporary artists, Tracey Emin, through an essay critically exploring the way in which her art both trades upon and commodifies her personal life traumas.
By appropriating, mimicking and recontextualizing material from celebrity interviews, Common Culture use ventriloquism to interrogate and challenge the forms and conventions of televisual entertainment media. Their practice employs humour and contextual displacement to create a viewing experience in which the normative forms and conventions of media representations of celebrity are defamiliarized and made available for critical reconsideration.
The three-screen video installation, Vent, parodies television celebrity interviews through a fractured ventriloquist act to explore how traumatic personal content is moulded and monetized as popular entertainment. Ventriloquism was selected as the device with which to foreground the highly manipulated and disingenuous character of broadcast media’s representation of celebrity, and to highlight such artifice in a vivid manner. Appropriated dialogue from celebrity confessional television interviews was transcribed and developed into scripts performed in Vent. A professional voice impersonator and skilled ventriloquist (Dean Kelly) was hired to play the part of the ventriloquist/interviewer, and to vocalise the dummy by performing dialogue mimicking a range of celebrity voices.
In the video works, ‘Dying is for Amateurs’ and ‘Trial by Media’, Common Culture composed and performed pop songs with lyrics formed from the delusional and narcissistic confessions of ‘celebrities’ drawn from the worlds of film, television, politics, music and art. Choreographing these songs, the research borrows the formal characteristics of dated television talent and music chart shows (such as the BBC’s Top of the Pops) as a formal register of a particular form of contemporary commodification.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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